LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, 



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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



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THE 



CELESTIAL SUMMONS 



BY 

REV. ANGELO CANOLL 

EDITED BY 

HOMER EATON, D.D. 



••Thou shalt guide me with thy counsel, and afterward receive 
me to glory."— Psalm 73. 24. 



( 



DEC 23 ' 



NEW YORK: EATON & MAINS 
CINCINNATI: CURTS & JENNINGS 



\ 



1 



TUB LIBRARY 
OF CONGRESS 



WASHINGTON 



Copyright by 

Eaton & mains, 

1896. 



Eaton & Mains Press, 
150 Fifth Avenue, New York. 



preface 



"Angelo Canoll, like Robertson, the 
great English preacher, will, we predict, 
should his sermons ever be published, be- 
come even more famous than when, in the 
active duties of the ministry, he composed 
and delivered them." These are the words 
of Dr. A. T. Needham, of the California 
Conference. There is reason to believe 
that wherever he labored, whether in the 
East or on the Pacific Coast, there is a wide 
and earnest call for a volume of Mr. Ca- 
noll's sermons. It is true that, unless it be 
the production of some preacher of world- 
wide celebrity, a volume of sermons, what- 
ever its literary or religious value, is not 
ordinarily understood to be a popular form 
of literature. Nevertheless, it is believed 
that Mr. Canoll's long established reputa- 
tion as a preacher of exceptional mental 
power, as well as of religious fervor and 
eloquence, fully authorizes the issue of the 

3 



preface 

present memorial volume of his discourses. 
The most cordial acknowledgments, on the 
part of all his friends and readers, are es- 
pecially due to Dr. Homer Eaton for the 
great pains taken, amid manifold cares and 
labors, to select and edit the contents of this 
volume. R. H. H. 

4 



Ifntrobuction 



The first time the writer ever saw the 
subject of this sketch, Rev. Angelo Canoll, 
was incidentally on the streets of Burling- 
ton, Vt., early in 1855. The latter was 
temporarily in the city to avail himself of 
the benefits of a certain sanitarium, mean- 
while attending the revival services in the 
Methodist Episcopal church conducted by 
Dr. John W. Redfield, whose fervid oratory 
he very greatly enjoyed. I remember dis- 
tinctly how Mr. Canoll at that time ap- 
peared. He was somewhat undersized, but 
very erect, neatly attired, and walked with 
a quick, elastic step and an easy, graceful 
carriage. His face was somewhat thin and 
pale. His head and countenance were of a 
highly intellectual cast, the latter animated 
by an expression significant of * 1 high think- 
ing and plain living/ ' 

My strictly personal acquaintance with 
Mr. Canoll began in the summer of 1856. 

5 



Untro&uction 



At that time I called on him at his lodgings 
in West Troy, N. Y., he then serving as 
pastor of the Ohio Street Methodist Episco- 
pal Church in that city. The interview- 
was a memorable one, and marked the be- 
ginning of a friendship that was destined, 
with ever-increasing interest and tender- 
ness, to continue for forty years, up to the 
hour of his death. 

Previous to this, however, as already in- 
timated, I had heard much of Mr. Canoll's 
reputation as a preacher. When but nine- 
teen years of age he had been stationed at 
Georgia, a small country village in north- 
ern Vermont. Thus early his repute as an 
eloquent preacher had extended into all the 
surrounding towns and awakened a most 
lively popular interest. 

In the spring of 1856 the Troy Confer- 
ence, of which Mr. Canoll was a member, 
held its annual session in Burlington. 
Though but twenty-four years of age, Mr. 
Canoll had at that time achieved such a rep- 
utation as a preacher that he was already 
accustomed, on Conference Sundays, to be 
assigned to leading pulpits. On the occasion 
alluded to he was appointed to preach, on 
Sunday evening, at the Congregational 

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ITntro&uctton 



church, one of the largest and most impor- 
tant in the city. It was the church where 
worshiped many of the ilite of that univer- 
sity town, including most of the college 
professors and students, as also the young 
ladies of a popular female seminary in the 
place. On the evening referred to the 
church was completely filled. Mr. Canoll 
labored under the disadvantage of being 
hardly more than able, because of his stat- 
ure, to look over the formidable battlements 
of that ancient pulpit. Nevertheless, no 
sooner had he announced his text and 
theme* than his sonorous and commanding 
voice riveted attention ; and presently the 
young preacher had that vast and august 
auditory completely in his power, and thus 
held it to the triumphant close. The next 
day gray-haired deacons vied with enthu- 
siastic college students and others in their 
glowing encomiums on that sermon. 

Naturally, even the most casual or unim- 
pressible hearer would not have hesitated 
under the circumstances, on behalf of a 



* u There be many that say, Who will show us any 
good? Lord, lift thou up the light of thy countenance upon 
us." — Psalms iv, 6. 

The theme was " Misanthropy and its Cure." 



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flntrofcuctfon 



young preacher of such mold, of such 
marked eloquence and power, to predict a 
brilliant and useful future. The object of 
this sketch is briefly to outline the career 
and to analyze the powers of this so gifted 
and promising preacher, while in the ser- 
mons that follow are presented a few speci- 
mens of his characteristic pulpit work. 

Rev. Angelo Canoll was born in Albany, 
N. Y., July 8, 1832. His early educational 
opportunities w r ere limited, but diligently 
improved. He seems at first to have been 
strongly attracted toward journalism. Later 
he determined to study law. Reared an 
Episcopalian, having, through Methodist 
influences, come early to an experimental 
knowledge of Christianity, he soon felt it 
his duty to preach the Gospel. 

His convictions in this regard were very 
pronounced. When afterward urged to 
continue his law studies his invariable and 
emphatic reply was, " I must preach." At 
sixteen he joined the Methodist Church, and 
a year later was licensed to preach and 
took work, as a supply, under the presiding 
elder. He joined the Troy Conference in 
1852. On November 28, i860, he was united 
in marriage with Miss Sarah Elizabeth 

8 



Ifntrotmctton 



Wood, of West Troy, N. Y. His active 
ministry continued about forty-four years, he 
having occupied some of the leading appoint- 
ments in five Conferences : Rutland, West 
Troy, Keeseville, and Albany, in the Troy 
Conference ; Worcester, Boston, and Lynn, 
in the New England Conference ; Nashua, 
in the New Hampshire Conference ; Taun- 
ton, Newport, Provincetown, Phoenix, New 
Bedford, and Nantucket, in the New Eng- 
land Southern Conference ; and San Fran- 
cisco, Stockton, Oroville, and Chico, in the 
California Conference. On many of these 
charges he had hopeful revivals, a form of 
labor in which he especially delighted and 
was eminently successful. While at the 
Conference which met at Pacific Grove, 
Cal., September, 6-u, 1893, he contracted 
la grippe, from the effects of which dread 
disease he never fully recovered. It cul- 
minated in quick consumption. The end 
came unexpectedly, but peacefully, at Chico, 
Cal., March 22, 1895. His last words were 
a hasty, tender "good-bye" to the lone, 
faithful, heartbroken watcher by his side. 

Mr. Canoll was eminently a pulpit orator. 
Even long before he attained his majority, 
he was regarded throughout the whole ex- 

9 



Ifntrofcuctton 



tent of his Conference a prodigy of pulpit 
ability, and ever thereafter, in all his various 
fields of labor, was uniformly considered a 
preacher of unique, versatile, and matchless 
gifts. His vivid imagination and imperial 
voice, whose every intonation was music, his 
fervent impulses, charming imagery, choice 
diction, and always fresh and vigorous 
thought, the whole set off by a faultless 
pulpit manner, combined to make him 
easily chief among his ministerial brethren. 
Not even in his very earliest years did Mr. 
Canoll ever court popularity by a sen- 
sational style or manner. He was always 
thoughtful, scholarly, manly, not to say pro- 
found. His style, if ornate, was always 
chastened, severely simple, and cast in the 
best of English. 

One of the bishops of the Methodist 
Episcopal Church, having once listened to a 
Conference sermon by Mr. Canoll, said at 
its conclusion, "I have heard a few great 
sermons; this is one of them." Another 
bishop, having heard him preach only a 
year or two before his death, made this 
comment : ' ' A perfect sermon from start 
to finish/ ' To few preachers is it given 
to receive such demonstrations of approval 

10 



Ifntrotmctfon 



during the delivery of a sermon, or such 
an enthusiastic ovation at its close as was 
accorded to Mr. Canoll on the occasion last 
referred to — the missionary anniversary of 
the California Conference. 

Our friend had the instincts of the poet, 
as well as the genius and the temperament 
of the orator. A sweet singer himself, he 
was a composer of hymns and tunes of rare 
merit. A more charming pastime can 
hardly be imagined than that of hearing 
him and his wife sing some of his own 
compositions. Only his excessive modesty 
prevented his winning a national reputa- 
tion as a sweet singer in our Israel. 

Mr. Canoll was an ardent lover and 
diligent student of nature ; a discriminating 
and sympathetic critic of art ; fully abreast 
with the most recent discoveries of science, 
as well as in touch with whatever apper- 
tained to matters of popular progress and 
reform. 

He was richly endowed with wit and 
humor, the one as sparkling as the other 
was exuberant. These qualities, however, 
only rarely shone in the pulpit. It was on 
the platform — and Mr. Canoll as a lecturer 
was always able, eloquent, and mostentcr- 

11 



ITntro&uctfon 



taining — and in his social life that these 
gifts became resplendent. 

For his social qualities Mr. Canoll was 
no less remarkable than for his mental. 
How hearty was his greeting ! How spon- 
taneous and joyous his utterances! How 
fervent and firm his attachments, rendering 
him no less delightful as a correspondent 
than as a visitor or public speaker. O, 
those letters! When shall we ever read 
their like again— so golden in phrase, mel- 
low in tone, rich in expressions of tender 
interest in the welfare of his friends, with 
only words of distrust concerning himself, 
and never an unkindly epithet for those who 
might have done him wrong? In a word, 
those who knew Mr. Canoll most intimately 
found him ever eminently modest, manly, 
genial, generous, and great-souled ; sensi- 
tive — painfully so, sometimes — but always 
kind-hearted and true. His life was gentle, 
and the elements so mixed in him that nature 
might stand up and say to all the world, 
" This was a man." 

Inasmuch as readers of this little volume 
who may never have known Mr. Canoll 
personally may be pleased to know the 
opinions of some of his contemporaries con- 

12 



flntro&uctfon 



cerning him, we are permitted to insert 
the following singularly tender, graceful, 
and discriminating tribute by Rev. A. T. 
Needham, D.D., of the California Confer- 
ence, and our departed and beloved brother's 
last presiding elder. He says : 

" Mr. Canoll was a man of unique 
mind and of most unobtrusive character, 
and hence never obtained the full recog- 
nition to which his remarkable talents 
entitled him. He was humble and artless 
as a child, and shrank from notoriety, 
courting retirement, while meriting the 
widest fame. He was not as the cheap 
merchant who sets his best goods in the 
show windows, but rather like the plain, 
massive museum, whose richest treasures are 
within and most closely guarded. A 
familiar acquaintance with the man always 
heightened respect. While his superior 
talents attracted the admiration of all who 
heard him, still the nobler traits of his char- 
acter only found expression in intercourse 
with friends and the duties of friend- 
ship. His loyalty to God was like that of 
Job, which led him to say, 1 Though he 
slay me, yet will I trust in him/ His 
loyalty to the Church was like that of 



irntrobuction 



Cowper to England, who said, 4 With all 
thy faults I love thee still/ His generosity 
was the weakness of absolute self-forgetful- 
ness. For him to preach was to afford his 
gifted mind opportunity to soar amid the 
grandest thoughts and to revel amid the 
noblest themes that ever engage the 
thoughts of men. Sermonizing was his 
paradise. The rhetorical beauty of his com- 
positions reminds one of the chaste English 
of Ossian's poems. He had the effusive 
smoothness of Macaulay, the naturalness of 
Goldsmith, the finish of De Quincey, and 
the philosophical penetration of Bacon. 
When aroused, like another Carlyle, he 
could hurl titanic blocks of truth to crush 
opposition or to annihilate error. In wit 
and repartee he was matchless. It was not 
the heavy, brutal satire that, like Richard 
Coeur de Lion's broadsword, could cut a bar 
of iron in two, bruising and mangling all it 
smote in its downward stroke, but rather it 
was like the thin edge of the Saracen's 
scimiter, that could cut a pillow of down in 
two without scattering a feather." 

It is interesting to note that Mr. Canoll's 
last text was one that might well have 
served as a beautiful motto for a life gov- 

14 



irntro&uctton 



erned by the convictions of such a ministe- 
rial call as was his. These were the words : 
" Thy vows are upon me, O God." After 
this last and most impressive discourse was 
over and the congregation dismissed he 
lingered in the pulpit, resting his head upon 
his hands, his frame shaking with emotion, 
until his wife, knowing his physical weak- 
ness, went to assist him; whereupon he 
turned to her and said, "When I come 
down out of this pulpit I shall not re- 
turn." Can anything surpass the pathos 
of this scene — this eminent and beloved 
minister thus loath to leave what, for so 
many years, had been the scene of his hap- 
piest moments and the throne of his power? 
For a moment he tarries and mourns a work 
to which, alas, he shall return no more ! 

In his study after his death his wife found 
the following two beautiful stanzas from his 
own pen scribbled on the back of a Sunday- 
school report : 

94 When bending o'er the field of life, 
When sinks my soul amid the strife, 

Of all things neath the sun — 
O God ! how doth it stir my heart, 
What power to work and wait impart, 

To hear that word ' Well done,' 



15 



Introduction 

" O, may I triumph so at last, 
O, may I hear, when life is past, 

That plaudit from the throne ! 
Then, Father, cheer me as I go, 
Look kindly down and speak, below, 

My all of hope — ' Well done.' " 

R. H. Howard. 

Oakdale, Mass. 



16 



Contents 

PAGE 

Preface 3 

Introduction 5 

I. 

The Celestial Summons 19 

II. 

Christ the World-Leader 41 

III. 

Nature's Interpretation of Immortality 67 

IV. 

The Land of Uprightness 89 

V. 

The Star of Bethlehem 107 

VI. 

Watching with Christ one Hour 129 

VII. 

Christianity a Spiritual Warfare 149 

17 



Contents 

VIII. 

PAGE 

The Great Plaudit 175 

IX. 

Christ's Sovereignty over the Human Heart 191 

X. 

The Ethical and the Esthetic in Christianity 217 

XL 

A Religion for All Time 237 

XII. 

The Millennial Call 257 

18 



I 

&l)e Celestial 0ummon0 



44 Arise ye, and depart; for tnis is not your rest/*— 
Micah Uf 10. 



^be Celestial Summons 



The Celestial Summons 

The words just quoted, although addressed 
to a particular people concerning a particular 
event in their history, have a universal ap- 
plicability to mankind too evident to escape 
attention. I think you will be unable, with 
myself, to dissociate them from the idea of 
a great voice speaking to the whole earth — 
the call of Providence in nature and in the 
heart and history of men. Both the brevity 
and the painful circumstances of our stay on 
earth declare with positiveness that this is 
not our rest ; and the call to arise and de- 
part is, therefore, an imperative command 
from which none can withhold his obe- 
dience. 

Our theme, then, is " The Celestial Sum- 
mons." Probably the most familiar theme 
of all time is the shortness of time. The 
resources of imaginative genius have been 

21 



Ube Celestial Summons 



fairly exhausted in the endeavor to illustrate 
it ; but who attempts to prove it ? Here at 
last is one proposition that maybe submitted 
without argument. The most daring skep- 
ticism cannot but be silent when a congre- 
gation arises and sings, 

" And am I born to die ? 
To lay this body down ? 
And must my trembling spirit fly 
Into a world unknown ? " 

Notwithstanding the variety of modes in 
which this solemn truth of the passing of 
time is presented to the mind, I cannot but 
think that the heart is a far more active 
agent in apprehending and realizing it. In 
other words, it is a truth which reaches us, not 
so much through the medium of the intellect, 
as of the sensibilities. It is in proportion 
as the world we inhabit is the soul-world 
and the life we live is the heart-life that its 
tender character has power to affect and 
subdue us. The in tensest life of man is the 
interior life, that profound and silent flow 
of thought and feeling which reaches out. 
and on forever, and seems shoreless as the 
ocean of eternity itself. It is chiefly on 
this sacred current that we can take a proper 
retrospect of the little course we have gone 

22 



Zhc Celestial Summons 



over in life and rightly determine the dis- 
tance that remains to be traversed before we 
finish our voyage to eternity. 

How nature talks to us of change and 
death ! Day and night, spring and summer, 
autumn and winter, are unwearied in their 
admonitions, forever saying, as they pass, 
" Grieve not for our fleetness — the gen- 
erations of men are passing like ourselves/' 
We look upon our gardens ; the flowers are 
fading, and the fresh leaves of yesterday 
are trodden in the path to-day, like human 
hopes beneath the march of time. The 
fields, with their withering grass, the 
forests, with their fading foliage, the 
waters, with their changing music, the sun- 
shine and the shade are ever breathing upon 
the heart the accents of mortality. And 
when we contemplate those great works and 
agencies of nature in which change is less 
palpable — the majestic mountains and the 
ethereal elements — we remember that at the 
advent of Him who saith, "Surely I come 
quickly," the very elements shall melt and 
the heavens and the earth shall pass away. 
Thus all the realms of our sojourning are 
inscribed with the summons, "Arise ye, 
and depart; for this is not your rest." 

23 



Zhc Celestial Summons 



Shall we now, awhile, look upon our fel- 
low-creatures, and survey the general move- 
ment of life around us ? We recognize in 
nearly all the forms of human action and 
experience the recurrence of the same 
lessons. Life, with most men, passes away 
in laborious efforts to make provision for 
that old age which appears so rapidly ap- 
proaching, though so many fall before the 
toilsome provision is required ; or in efforts 
to secure those honors and distinctions 
which, they seem to be sensible, must soon 
or never be acquired. Even the wildest 
ecstasies of pleasure suggest, to a thought- 
ful mind, the folly of wasting life in 
pleasures that soon can yield no joy and of 
carpeting with flowers the paths that must so 
soon lead to satiety, disappointment, and 
misanthropy. 

What means the rush of life about us, the 
restless hurrying to and fro ? What means 
this clangor of many voices, this feverish 
tumult of existence ? What have we in all 
this but the eager voices of a dying race 
busily fulfilling their plans while the short 
day lasts, the hurried tread of pilgrim feet 
on the road that leads so quickly to eternity? 

Everything about us points to the fact 

24 



TEbe Celestial Summons 



that we are pilgrims and strangers, as all 
our fathers were. To some other order of 
beings, or to our own in some different era, 
the days of the oldest would really repre- 
sent but a youthful existence ; yet they ap- 
pear many, and life so old, so familiar have 
we become with early decay and early 
death. Of generations but a little beyond 
us we rarely meet sufficient traces to bring 
them distinctly before us. The hopes they 
cherished, the sorrows they felt, the altars 
around which they worshiped, the homes 
where they watched the sunset, all the 
earnest, loving, rejoicing, anguishing part 
they bore in this tragic human mystery — 
this, with us, is a matter of equal ignorance 
and indifference. They are gone, they 
have rushed by, like mighty waves, to give 
place to the impatient generations that have 
followed, and from the shores they have 
reached we hear no voice or sound but the 
voice that speaketh in our hearts, ' i Arise 
ye, and depart; for this is not your rest." 

How clear is this celestial summons in all 
the voices of our own history! It is the 
most clearly heard when we take a retro- 
spect of childhood, that season when the 
garden and the grove were vocal with the 

25 



Ube Celestial Summons 



songs of joy and hope. And then we sit 
alone in the twilight and remember, as in a 
dream, the eventful experiences of the 
intervening time, and a long procession 
passes in review before us, but passes 
swiftly. And the same thing is true of 
every succeeding period. Even old age 
wipes its tearful eye and says, ' ' All this is 
familiar as a dream of yesterday." Visions 
that once threw the light of beauty over 
life have dimmed and darkened and dis- 
solved. Hopes that were fragrant in our 
way bloom no more. The lute beneath 
the laurel is hanging on the cypress now, 
and the dreamer's land of light and music 
is become the field of life's hard struggle or 
the grave's deep rest. Not in the weak- 
ness but in the tenderness of nature we 
look back, and the clustering associations of 
other days and other scenes lie cold and 
silent on the sere slopes of the past. One 
after another, its bright fountains are 
hushed and its sacred altars crumble, and 
all the changing scenery behind us is 
crowded with reminders that this is not 
our rest. 

Each different era of our lives is marked 
by a certain characteristic train of pleasures 

26 



Ttbe Celestial Summons 



and griefs, hopes and anxieties, aims and 
efforts peculiar to itself. How swiftly one 
such train of life-experiences passes away 
and gives place to a new succession, which, 
in its turn, lingers with us but a little while 
before that, too, disappears forever! With 
each of these fleeting successions goes much 
of life. By degrees, the mementoes of 
mortality crowd all the chambers of thought 
and feeling, of memory and love, and we 
are continually reminded of our onward 
hastening. Heart-links that bind us to the 
past are powerless to resist the silent draw- 
ings of futurity. Day and night, on the 
wings of every hour, the summons comes to 
us, "Arise ye, and depart; for this is not 
your rest." 

In all the range of experience we have 
been considering, you will perceive that the 
declaration that "this is not your rest," 
and the command, "Arise ye, and depart," 
are absolute and imperative. We may not 
wish to believe that declaration, yet a little 
experience soon proves it true ; we may not 
wish to heed that command, yet we are the 
involuntary subjects of its urgency. Who 
can make this world his rest? We may 
treat this earthly scene as if it were indeed 

27 



Zbc Celestial Summons 



our rest ; we may love it as such ; we may 
refuse to consider it otherwise. But, even 
if sickness should not blast and death 
should not devour, yet hope will ofttimes 
be deferred, making the heart sick ; any one 
of a thousand contingencies may seriously 
mar our plan or overthrow it altogether; 
our affairs, conducted with utmost skill and 
forethought, will never correspond . to our 
wishes; the expected good will not come, 
or the good possessed will pass away, and 
the truth will stand unimpeached and more 
emphatic in the very fruitlessness of our 
efforts that "this is not our rest." 

Were it otherwise, could we secure to 
hope her fruition, her happiness, her earthly 
paradise, then the "Arise, depart," would 
come in to renew the dilemma. What 
defense may we provide against this neces- 
sity? We parry the blow for a while, 
suppose. Very well; we may interpose 
the physician's skill in our behalf, we may 
extract the virtues of every healing plant 
that blossoms in the dew of heaven, we 
may fly, panting fugitives from death, 
through foreign climes, wandering over 
strange and unsympathizing shores, where 
our childhood's home lies far away and our 

28 



tXbe Celestial Summons 



mother's name was never heard. Alas, we 
shall but 

" Linger out a few more years in pain." 

The summons will soon come with a 
resistless power, and we shall, we must, 
arise and depart; we must go forth with 
death. 

I have presented you with some suffi- 
ciently melancholy reflections. Let us see 
if the subject has not a brighter side, a 
more genial cast. 

Let me say that there is also a spiritual 
summons, a call to arise and away which is 
addressed to the free, self-determining 
spirit of man. It is the voice celestial 
speaking to his heart to leave a disap- 
pointed worldliness and bidding his hopes 
and affections draw near to the Father of 
spirits. i i Arise ye, and depart," it says; 
"for this is not your rest." "Come unto 
me," it says, "all ye that labor and are 
heavy laden, and I will give you rest/' 
Though "in the world ye shall have tribu- 
lation," it says, "I have spoken unto you, 
that in me ye might have peace;" and yet 
again, "There remaineth a rest to the 

people of God." Approach this rest, go 
3 

39 



Uftc Celestial Summons 

forth and seek it. In newness of life arise ; 
as children of a King depart. 

This summons is not, like the other, com- 
pelling and irresistible. It is addressed to 
the free spirit of man, to his voluntary 
powers and affections. It is a call to come 
home to God, to come home to the Father's 
love and the Father's house, a call which is 
committed to the free volitions of the soul ; 
and it may accept, or it may decline. Thank 
God, there are those who do accept, and 
life becomes to them, thereafter, a spiritual 
pilgrimage from rest to rest. With them, 
it is no longer a matter of despairing grief 
that their hearts, 

" Like muffled drums, are beating 
Funeral marches to the grave ; " 

for their spirit has heard its nobler sum- 
mons and is busily seeking a better coun- 
try. 

This celestial summons, thus accepted in 
its spiritual interpretation, effectually neu- 
tralizes to a sensitive nature the dismal 
death-tint that tinges all things. Instead, 
it touches all things with a light of beauty 
and hope. To die is not to fall a victim to 
a tyrant, but to arise to a coronation ; not 

30 



Zhc Celestial Summons 



to depart scourged 1 ' like a quarry-slave at 
night," or even 

" Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch 
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams," 

but to float up, love-wafted, angel-beckoned, 
God-welcomed home. All the associations 
and concomitants of death are correspond- 
ingly transfigured ; present evil, as an ele- 
ment of gracious discipline, is security for 
future good ; age is an advancement toward 
eternal youth; mortality and immortality 
become convertible terms. 

It is only during a brief early portion of 
our lives that the advance of time can be 
contemplated with pleasure or satisfation on 
any earthly grounds ; and then only by the 
comparatively thoughtless or inexperienced, 
who see only the brightness of the new, 
without its darker possibilities of change 
and death, or at least the dark certainty of 
both approaching nearer every hour. Hence, 
it is natural that the mass of the people 
should yield but a reluctant and extorted 
obedience to the summons of time and age 
and death, that the heart should chafe at its 
limitations, and life become a helpless 
struggle against its tyrannous destiny. It 

31 



TTbe Celestial Summons 



is natural that people should cling to the 
present good unless assured that the future 
can bring them a greater or an equal one ; 
at least, that they should prefer to submit 
to present evils rather than fly to others 
that they " know not of." 

Our " Merry Christmas" and 1 'Happy 
New Year" wishes are kindly meant. But so 
many Christmases and so many new years 
and old years suggest things not always cal- 
culated to make one particularly happy or 
merry; for to realize that the grave is one 
year nearer is not abstractly a cheering 
reflection or a natural occasion for merry- 
making. Ordinary experience recoils from 
time-changes. The will acquiesces from 
necessity, but would fight if there were a 
gleam of hope for success; and the heart 
does resist, in its silent, hopeless way. 

Were there only some way to make us 
willing passengers out of this world, how 
much of the bitterness and the struggle 
would be taken out of life ! And there is a 
way. Christianity accomplishes all this. It 
shows death as a way station where the 
Christian train does not stop. It reveals a 
heavenly destination which charms the soul 
pleasantly forward. It is only the inward 

32 



Ube Celestial Summons 



resistance, the vain but defiant antagonism, 
that makes the summons to depart appear so 
despotic and terrible. When this is re- 
moved by the faith that sings, " I would 
not live alway" here, because I would live 
alway there, then the compulsory power, 
the arbitrary character, that previously 
made up the idea of death 1 * are felt and 
feared no more." 

The Christian is not driven out of the 
world. He marches with a free heart and a 
light step. How can we fail to recognize 
in Christianity a sound, practical, and 
beautiful philosophy of life? When we 
have heard the despairing admissions of 
skeptical philosophy, as it crouches back to 
dust under the shadow of that universal 
death-mystery, when we have seen the 
sublimest inspiration of poetry fail, and 
marked how the gladdest voices that ever 
sang in sympathy with living nature have 
faltered and become hushed at the contact 
with dying nature, or only striven to articu- 
late the dirge of all good, how can we be 
thankful enough for the mission of the 
Christian religion by which the law of all 
change, the decree of all death, is glorified 
as a celestial summons, a call to come up out 

88 



Zhc Celestial Summons 



of the region of death to the fullness of life, 
the consummation and triumph of all our 
hopes and longings — death swallowed up in 
victory, and the creature that was made sub- 
ject to vanity delivered into the glorious 
liberty of the sons of God. 

Of course, it would not be admissible now 
to enter upon the proofs of that heavenly 
immortality attainable through Christ, nor 
could I, without detaining you with all the 
various proofs of Christianity itself in 
which that truth is involved. To me it 
seems proof sufficient that, without such 
immortality, God, or something else, if you 
please, has taken infinite pains to organize 
this world in the interest of death, which 
swoops down upon the scene conqueror at 
last ; whereas, we cannot but believe, from 
the millionfold adaptations, from the gen- 
eral spirit and method, of nature, that it 
was organized in the interest of life, and 
that life, not death, is the plan that inheres 
in it and the power that administers it and 
the ultimate object it stands for and sub- 
serves. Between these two hypotheses, it 
seems to me, we must choose. Either 
death or life is the final all, the complete 
sum and outcome ; nature is the agent of 

34 



Zftc Celestial Summons 



the one or the other. A serious, intelligent 
glance at the spirit and movement of nature 
should be enough to settle the question 
whether death or life is the objective point 
of all its magnificently vital forces and 
living system. 

Nor may I linger to describe the method 
by which a sense of union with Christ be- 
comes not only a conviction, but the con- 
sciousness, of immortality and an intuition 
— will you start if I shall call it so? — an in- 
tuition of the new life, of the new man in 
Christ Jesus. " For we that are in this 
tabernacle do groan, being burdened : not 
for that we would be unclothed, but clothed 
upon, that mortality might be swallowed 
up of life. Now he that hath wrought us 
for the selfsame thing is God, who also hath 
given unto us the earnest of the Spirit. 
Therefore we are always confident, know- 
ing that, while we are at home in the body, 
we are absent from the Lord." This con- 
fidence of immortality in the mind of the 
Christian believer grows clearer and clearer 
as the soul advances in Christ from sin to 
holiness ; and its possession by the children 
of God throughout the world, of every ex- 
treme of youth and age and culture, from 

35 



Hbe Celestial Summons 



the ripe Christian scholar or philosopher 
down to the last pagan convert, in spite of 
all the difficulties that may formerly have 
complicated the idea of immortality in their 
minds, and still do in others — this fact is 
not otherwise to be explained than by the 
workings of the Spirit, and ought not to be 
underrated in the argument. 

But it is not in my province to-day to 
argue the truth of the conviction, but simply 
to show what a power there is in it, what a 
reversal of our despair, what brighter views 
of existence, what an exaltation and coro- 
nation of humanity. Life, as an angel, 
comes flying, veiled in mortal mystery, and 
death is the summons, not into the cloud, 
but through the cloud, to the immortal 
life that rides upon it. And such hymns 
of peace, such hallelujahs of salvation, as 
the soul sings when that cloud is rifted to 
its vision and it catches a view of its re- 
demption from death ! If this were known 
as it might be known it would thrill the 
world with joy. Death, viewed in itself, is 
such an appalling and all-shadowing evil 
that for most people it takes the very heart 
out of life, even while they do live, and 
leaves them only the moral skeletons of 



Uhc Celestial Summons 



themselves, instead of the strong, brave, 
buoyant, triumphant men and women they 
ought to be. It is an awful thing to go 
through the world carrying the burden of 
death everywhere and into all things — upon 
your mind death, upon your heart death, 
upon the works of your hands death ; 
thought, feeling, action all overshadowed 
and overwhelmed with it. 

He who hears the celestial summons and 
in spirit answers it lays that burden down, 
and the life angel walks with him thence- 
forth. In the sick room and the desolate 
home, and beside the graves of yesterday 
and to-day, and through the suspense that 
shadows the seas, the thought of death now 
throws him back upon the heart of life, 
gives him an intenser sympathy with life, a 
grander enthusiasm for it, now that he 
knows that the meaning of things is life 
and not death. 

And while immortality is there, the call 
to action for it is here ; and in pursuance of 
that action and preparation for it, in him- 
self and in all around him, the true life 
grows and spreads, plants its kingdom 
deeper in the heart, wider through the 
world, until all earth and time are suffused 



07 



Ube Celestial Summons 



with the beauty, and rapt in the music, 
of one celestial summons pealing its tri- 
umphal anthem over all that we called 
death. All humanity hears the omnipo- 
tent voice that utters, "Arise ye, and de- 
part ; for this is not your rest ; " while only 
faith hears it add, " Come unto me, all ye 
that labor and are heavy laden, and I will 
give you rest;" and hears again, "There 
remaineth a rest for the people of God." 

There are those who do hear the higher 
spiritual summons; but others "forbear." 
For them no life lessons avail, no life expe- 
riences have any spiritually elevating power. 
Do they not suggest an analogy to the chil- 
dren of Israel, to whom the text was origi- 
nally addressed ? The land where they dwelt 
was shortly to be visited with the horrors of 
invasive war, and there they could not rest ; 
they must needs arise and depart. But did 
they depart for a happy land, for a con- 
genial dwelling? Nay, they went forth to 
a long and grievous captivity, where they 
could not but remember, with tears of vain 
remorse, the land they had so impiously in- 
habited, a land from which they had been 
cast forth, yet not to find a rest. 

How then should this Scripture be ap- 

38 



Ube Celestial Summons 



plied to us all? Shall it be said, in the 
stern, arbitrary sense first considered, 
i ' Arise ye, and depart ; for this is not your 
rest ? " Need it be enjoined, ' 6 Gather your- 
selves unto your fathers, hasten on to the 
valley of death, arise, depart, and die?" 
O, there is a voice in nature crying thus, 
the utterance of a Power that will be heard 
and will be obeyed. Nay, then, let us arise 
spiritually and depart voluntarily. The 
affections transferred above, every duty 
performed, every sin and temptation van- 
quished, these shall be the successive steps 
of our pilgrimage in obedience to the celes- 
tial summons, as we ascend from death to 
the fullness of life in the world beyond. 

39 



II 



44 Behold, I have given him for ♦ • • a lezdet and com- 
mander to the people/* — Isa, Iv, 4» 



TTbe Celestial Summons 



II 

Christ the World-Leader 

The whole past compels the conclusion 
that there naturally inheres in humanity no 
effective tendency to seek out and make for 
itself a career such as it might justly aspire 
after, such as would achieve its grandest 
possibilities in this world. That tendency 
can only be derived from without, as a fire 
is kindled from beyond itself — from some 
higher, diviner, yet not inaccessible altar. 
The grand movement of which humanity is 
capable can proceed only under the accepted 
auspices of some superior and mighty leader- 
ship, marching at the head of the whole 
monarchy of men. 

What, would we say, must be the quali- 
fications for such a world-leadership ? On 
this point our opinions need not be fanciful. 
The history of the world defines and deter- 
mines the necessary qualifications, as truly 
as the physical constitution of this planet 
defines what it requires for a sun. Whether 
supplied or not, the demands are explicit. 

43 



Zbc Celestial Summons 



The Leader must be a Person, not an idea 
or a system. Mankind is not fitted to follow 
the guidance of any abstraction. He must 
be " Man with men ; " not only human, but 
intensely human ; with hands that our hands 
can clasp, with eyes into which our eyes can 
look, with a heart against which our hearts 
can throb ; with us, for us, of us ; gathering 
the sympathies and attachments of his fol- 
lowers around one real and intensely human 
personality. 

Yet, while human, his nature must have 
a comprehensiveness which embraces hu- 
manity — all which that solemn name means 
and includes. Statesmanship deals mostly 
with local political interests and relations ; 
political economy itself only treats of the 
same things on a larger plane ; philosophy 
addresses itself to the intellect, and poetry 
to the heart ; experience furnishes itself from 
the incomplete records of the past; and 
sagacity infers the probabilities concerning 
the immediate period which can scarcely be 
called future. But the Leader must give the 
law from which laws are made, must ex-* 
pound the conditions and furnish the ele- 
mental strength of true social prosperity 
and secular progress. He must meet the 

44 



Ube Celestial Summons 



profoundest problems of thought, not with 
the laboring and uncertain methods of logic, 
but with the swift and sure light of absolute 
truth. He must interpret to the human 
heart the mystery of its ceaseless dream, by 
disclosing realities of being that match its 
boundless longings and suspense, and must 
make clear to men that their longings re- 
sound to truths deep-set in the Invisible. 
He must group the lessons of the past with 
an intelligence that is more than experience, 
and conduct to the future with an insight 
that is not calculation, but revelation. All 
this is implied in his office. 

The Leader must be the reconciler of the 
contradictions of history, the conflicting 
facts of human nature, of human existence. 
Why is man a being at once so abject and 
so exalted, retaining amid so much folly 
such noble reason, amid so much wickedness 
such authority of conscience, doomed to such 
brevity of life, yet dying in a vision of im- 
mortality, so earthly, so animal, and yet so 
" little lower than the angels ?" What phi- 
losophy or religion gives us the clew to these 
enigmas of existence, these paradoxes of our 
nature ? Where is the system that unfolds 

the hidden correspondences and harmonies 
4 

45 



Ube Gelesttal Summons 



of these opposing facts, that logically com- 
bines them, and thus practically elucidates 
them? 

But if the attitude which the Gospel holds 
toward either of these opposing lines of fact 
were to be changed the Gospel itself would 
be destroyed. It requires them both, it is 
built upon them both together. It recon- 
ciles this great contradiction in the human 
soul. If man is a being morally fallen, yet 
redeemed ; a violator of divine law, yet an 
inheritor of divine mercy ; to be disciplined 
on earth for heaven — these truths explain the 
conflict in the facts of human existence and 
unify its opposite tendencies into parts of 
one great moral order. Yes, so strongly 
intrenched in the very facts of human nature 
is His claim whom we believe God has given 
for a Leader to the people that you cannot 
resolve the system of human life without 
him, nor without him meet the conditions of 
a philosophical idea of humanity. 

The Leader of humanity must be a moral 
Leader. Indeed, no man has ever been in 
any broad sense a leader of considerable 
masses of men who has not been identified 
with the moral element and acted upon 
men through their moral consciousness. 

46 



Zbc Celestial Summons 



No philosopher, no hero, no civilian, as 
such, has created a new social order perma- 
nently operative. Great revolutions hinge 
on moral ideas. Humanity is constituted 
to be controlled through its moral faculties. 
The World- Leader must appreciate the 
sanctity of the human soul. He must be 
able to answer those great questions, to 
represent those supreme interests, that are 
heard and felt in the spiritual consciousness 
of being. And what an astonishing variety 
of offices this involves ! 

He must attack the prejudices of error, 
conciliating prejudice with the satisfactions 
of truth. He must quicken the sense of 
responsibility, yet meet the exigency of sin 
with the proffer of righteousness. He must 
provoke and pacify the conscience, striking 
the sword of terror into the heart of guilt, 
yet waving over the penitent heart the 
scepter of peace. And since, at the awful 
juncture where all is at stake and all is in 
suspense, humanity has but one supreme 
desire — the desire for God and immortality 
— he must be ready, not only to prove their 
existence, but to enable that desire to attain 
its fulfillment, supplying what will satisfy 
the soul and support it in its mortal crisis. 

47 



Uhc Celestial Summons 



He must reach the whole distance from the 
genesis of a human life up to the human ul- 
timate, from the divine thought incarnated 
in the cradled infant up to the full-grown, 
full-saved man triumphant and immortal. 

But in whom could we trust for such 
offices as these? He whom we shall trust 
must first be able to still the raging sea and 
raise the dead. Alas for the leader who 
should need to depend alone on the superior 
wisdom of his teaching or the purity of his 
ethics ! Wisdom and purity might be 
transcendent, and for that very reason 
transcend the capacity of many in the 
world-crowd to recognize their worth. In 
matters that depend upon purely intellect- 
ual and moral perceptions the result must 
always be uncertain in a world where the 
eye of the understanding and the eye of the 
conscience are both so liable to be diseased. 

The Leader, therefore, needs to authen- 
ticate himself to men, partly, through the 
medium of the senses, by proofs of such a 
kind, of such an outward, sensible kind, as 
shall leave no reasonable doubt of his di- 
vine commission. 

Now, in regard to that heaven-appointed 
Leader who is known by the name of Jesus 

48 



Ube Celestial Summons 

the Christ, I know of little that impresses 
one more profoundly with the truthfulness 
of his claim, or that goes further to invest 
it with an air of candor and sincerity, than 
the continuous appeal he makes to those 
plain, open, matter-of-fact, yet extraordi- 
nary works of which the very senses of 
common men can judge for themselves. 
His whole personal history is so everywhere 
interpenetrated and suffused with the mi- 
raculous element that there is no possibility 
of its having been interpolated by a later 
age ; it cannot be excluded without destroy- 
ing the Christ of history and constructing a 
new Christ that history has never known — 
which would be no explanation at all of the 
Christ it does know. 

It would not be allowable now to bring for- 
ward formal proofs of the genuineness of his 
miracles. It is only permitted me to point 
to the fact that just that kind of evidence 
which would properly be demanded and 
would be necessary to authenticate a heaven- 
appointed Leader of men — exactly such evi- 
dence he appealed to ; and, though theo- 
retical and metaphysical arguments without 
number have been urged against his mira- 
cles, they stand without an answer from the 

*9 



XCbe Celestial Summons 



purely historical side to this day. Few real- 
ize, I think, how deep and broad and mass- 
ive this evidence is. For twenty centuries 
before his birth the institutions, the whole 
civil and religious polity and history of the 
most conservative people of all time were 
being continuously elaborated into a man- 
ifold and striking prophecy and type, to 
which the facts of Christianity exactly cor- 
respond, as antitypes, as the objects that 
were represented — involving a long succes- 
sion of widely scattered agencies beyond the 
possibility of collusion, and that could not 
have known to what end they were work- 
ing. 

Not less than four thousand years had 
rolled away since the first dim promise was 
given of the conquering One who should 
come. Not less than two thousand years be- 
fore had Abraham heard it said, "In thy 
seed shall all nations of the earth be 
blessed/' It was nearly as many since 
the patriarch Jacob, in dying, had declared, 
" The scepter shall not depart from Judah, 
nor a lawgiver from between his feet, 
until Shiloh come ; and unto him shall 
the gathering of the people be." How 
wonderful to know that after that lapse of 

60 



Ube Celestial Summons 



ages, when the ten tribes had been utterly 
dispersed and confounded and Benjamin 
absorbed, that that single tribe of Judah, 
though on the eve of the same fate from the 
Roman power, did retain her distinctive 
tribeship and ruler until Christ appeared — 
the last native lawgiver she has seen from 
that day to this! Still further, ancient 
prophecy had even foretold the family of 
his descent, the town of his birth, and 
nearly five hundred years before the event 
Daniel's famous prophecy had defined the 
immediate time. 

Yet, after all, how could such a Being 
ever be? What incompatible conditions, 
what self -contradictory characteristics, must 
such an existence involve ! For he should 
be David's Lord, and he should be David's 
son. He should be the delight of the in- 
tolerant Jews, and he should be the hope of 
the hated Gentiles. He was to be the terri- 
ble Lion of the tribe of Judah, and he was 
to be the meek Lamb of God. He was to be 
the King of glory, and he was to be a Man 
of sorrows. All kingdoms, all languages 
should serve him, and of the people there 
should be none with him. He should have 
an everlasting dominion, and he should fill a 

51 



Ube Celestial Summons 



felon's grave. How could such conflicting 
opposites ever be combined in one and the 
same being? 

Here was a plan running through the 
ages, underlying the revolutions of empires, 
contemplating a world-leadership; a plan 
that could no more be fulfilled by collusion 
than it could be fulfilled by chance, and 
that sets either explanation at utter de- 
fiance ; a plan which neither human wisdom 
nor human folly would have predicted, and 
only almighty power could fulfill. 

To him who can meet the conditions, God 
issues credentials for the leadership of the 
world. And Christ alone meets the con- 
ditions and holds the credentials. They 
stand out as plain and clear in his life as the 
mountains on the earth and the stars in the 
sky. They resolve the history of the world 
into moral unity. Against this massed and 
monumental evidence which I have barely 
alluded to, the flimsy, filmy theories of 
rationalism dash as vainly as the shock of 
wreathed cobwebs against the pyramids of 
Egypt. What can it avail infidelity to con- 
trovert each separate miracle of Christ, 
unless it can overthrow that measureless 
miracle which Christ himself presents? 

52 



TEbe Celestial Summons 



And with a proper authentication to the 
reason and the most profound authentica- 
tion to the conscience, the Leader should 
also be authenticated to the heart, the 
affections. But where is the leader who is 
able, out of his own love to humanity, to 
kindle an answering love that shall be the 
principle of a deathless loyalty and the very 
motive power of a new kingdom among 
men? We have heard of but one solitary 
name that fills this condition. 

Every human creature on this planet has 
this latent claim upon his loyalty, even if 
he know it not, because Christ died for him 
— " He tasted death for every man." But 
herein what is his claim more than an- 
other's? Have not kindred died for their 
own, and have not heroes, martyrs, philan- 
thropists without number died for the 
world? Nay, not one; never. Name me 
an instance. Each of the glorious number 
was destined some time to die. In a little 
while the one event that happeneth to all 
was inevitable. Christian writers, so far as 
I am aware, have missed the true ground of 
Christ's preeminence. The peerless and 
unapproachable claim of Jesus on the sym- 
pathy and affection of the race is that he is 

S3 



Zhc Celestial Summons 



the only voluntary offering ever sacrificed 
to death. It was the deathless who died 
for us ; he who had life in himself 1 ' became 
obedient unto death." Heroes, martyrs, 
and all the millions who have passed away 
went forth to death as to a tyrant, de- 
throned though he were. But the Prince 
of life leaped into his arms — from the 
throne of heaven he dropped into the grave. 
And when from that grave he comes forth, 
lighting the despair of the world by his 
sublimely significant resurrection, he ac- 
quires such a claim on our love and loyalty 
that it is a joy to fall at his feet and cry, 
"Take the leadership of my life, of my 
soul ; the leadership of the world belongs 
to thee." 

And how gloriously he accomplishes his 
commission ! How all oppositions and an- 
tagonisms are made in some way to subserve 
it ! Do not imagine that Christ exerts no 
leadership where he finds no loyalty ; he is 
mightj even there, Christ is the only 
moral leader who has succeeded in impress- 
ing and controlling myriads of men in the 
face of their resistance. In his Gospel they 
reject him ; but in the Christian standard of 
morality, in the Christian idea of society, in 

54 



tbe Celestial Summons 

the code that pervades all Christendom, they 
must receive him. Scores of millions hos- 
tile to Christianity are marshaled into the 
grand movement of Christian civilization 
and wielded against their will. A mighty 
Leader, who can accomplish this ! 

When Abraham and Moses received the 
initial truths now expanded into this glow- 
ing Gospel there was not a nation on the 
earth that asserted the unity of God. The 
Egyptian priest, if he knew it, dared not 
whisper it. Now it is generally proclaimed 
and known under the broad heavens, and 
Christ has led up millions of devotees of 
false religions out of the grossness of the 
primitive polytheism. There was an ancient 
poet or two who sang, half consciously, of 
one universal Father; but it was Christ who 
gave meaning and authority and realization 
to the great truth of the fatherhood of God. 

Thenceforth all things were possible 
which the progress of the race required. 
Nonsense of madness — this effort to antag- 
onize the Christian religion with the very 
humanitarianism that was born of it and 
lives by it, as if the fatherhood of God did 
not involve the brotherhood of men, as if it 
was not Christ himself who led humanity 



Ube Celestial Summons 



up to this high level and brought humanita- 
rianism in. The Christian Church was the 
first social experiment in history that had 
the aim of universality, and is the only one 
to this day that has the elements of it. The 
Roman knew only Rome, the Greek knew 
only Greece ; it was man in Christ who first 
knew the world. Christ led humanity up 
to the ideal of itself, and now he must lead 
on more and more to its realization. 

I read in a skeptical, scoffing American 
magazine this admission : ' c It was only with 
the advent of Christianity that the idea of 
one great family, each of whom must labor 
for all the rest, came in. That idea has 
been the nurse, not only of modern civil 
freedom, but of modern science." Hear 
this sentiment, also found where we should 
not expect it, of one of the most eminent of 
modern scientists: "Not till the right of 
all nations of the world to be classed as 
members of one genus or kind was recog- 
nized can we look even for the beginning 
of our science. That change [says the 
writer] was accomplished by Christianity." 
The birth of liberty, the beginning of sci- 
ence — think of that. Personally, I am not 
anxious about having the name of God 

56 



Ube Celestial Summons 



inserted in the Constitution ; but I want it 
understood that in all the world's magna 
chartas and declarations of independence, 
and in every line that guarantees the rights 
of constitutional liberty — his name is there, 
written by the hand of his own providence. 

Show us a Copernican cosmogony, or a 
Baconian philosophy, or a Newtonian law, 
or a free school system, or a demand for 
liberal and popular education ; show us dis- 
coveries throwing open the mysteries of 
heaven and earth to the craving for knowl- 
edge, or an impulse of invention girdling 
the world with new and marvelous forces — 
printing press and steam engine and rail- 
way and telegraph and all they pioneer in 
art and artisanship ; show us a general dif- 
fusion of intelligence and personal inde- 
pendence and social comfort liberally shared 
by the mass of the people ; find somewhere 
a general abolition of slavery, or a crusade 
against caste, or a real popular ballot, or a 
real representative system, or an emancipa- 
tion of woman ; find an unselfish missionary 
zeal crossing mountain and sea to toil in the 
face of death without hope of earthly re- 
ward ; point us to the spectacle of peace 
societies and temperance societies and be- 



TTbe Celestial Summons 



nevolent societies and sanitary associations 
and cooperative associations and prison re- 
form associations ; or get up an international 
fair, or an international code, or a congress 
of science, or a labor congress, or a ten 
hour law, or a homestead exemption law, or 
free medical attendance for the poor, or a 
free circulating library, or a sailors* bethel, 
or a life-saving service, or a poor children's 
excursion, or a flower mission, or an orphan- 
age, or a hospital, or an old people's home 
— anywhere on all the earth, through all 
time, where the quickening impulse has not 
been given and the marches of life have not 
been led by One of whom the living God 
makes the announcement, " Behold, I have 
given him for ... a leader and commander 
to the people.' ' 

If God has not given him for a Leader to 
the people, what is the secret of his un- 
paralleled powder over all the people, the im- 
mediate possession he takes of the individual 
soul? In contact with the Gospel every 
person instantly feels, " There is something 
here for me." Who to-day calls Plato his 
master or Alexander his captain or Cassar 
his king? Christ, indeed, dealt with uni- 
versal truths, universal wants and relations 

58 



Ube Celestial Summons 



and experiences ; buthismeasurelessbreadth 
and sympathy insure his leadership over 
men. Myriad myriads of hearts the wide 
world over find their all in Jesus. Igno- 
rance and inexperience find wisdom in him. 
Poverty discovers in him a treasure. The 
child loves him. Age leans upon him. 
Guided by his truth and guarded by his 
love, millions walk life's troubled paths 
secure and peaceful, and then, fearing no 
evil, walk into the valley of the shadow of 
death singing his praises and shouting his 
glory to the last. 

Christ's kingdom knows no localisms, no 
political barrier. Its banners wave from 
hemisphere to hemisphere, signaling all in- 
terests, all peoples, all men. It not only 
stands, but grows. Infidelity says, in a 
sense, that Christ never was, never came 
out of nonentity. Infidelity says he is dead ; 
that after a few years of unsuccessful life he 
perished ; and yet it cannot let him alone, but 
keeps the printing press of the world fairly 
groaning under the burden of its reexam- 
inations and restatements and new hypothe- 
ses of a matter which, according to its own 
view, should naturally have dropped into 
oblivion two thousand years ago ; Germany, 

59 



XTbe Celestial Summons 



alone, in a single year publishing five hun- 
dred scholarly volumes in discussion of the 
subject— a very respectable posthumous in- 
fluence for a dead man who never was. 
Every year Christ gains a deeper control 
over the thought- currents of the world. In 
all the changes of history he is present. 

Once in a while it may be allowable, I 
hope, to commute statistics for principles and 
moral facts that give statistics their highest 
value. It is well to brace ourselves for mis- 
sionary work by feeling the eternal rock we 
stand upon. The question of all questions 
in reference to the missionary movement is 
this : Is it in accord with the divine move- 
ment, is it in pursuance of the divine idea, 
the divine plan in human history? The 
demonstrated fact of Christ's world-leader- 
ship answers this question. Events are an- 
swering it with the thunder of God. 

It is found that a heathen or semiheathen 
civilization cannot permanently stand in the 
presence of the steamships and the railroads 
and telegraphs, the ideas and enterprise of 
Christian civilization. Deny who will that * 
immemorial forms of heathenism are disin- 
tegrating and losing their prestige and are 
destined to leave the widest religious void 

eo 



TTfee Celestial Summons 



the world lias ever seen — a vacant moral 
throne over more than half the world ; deny 
who can that Christ is marching toward that 
throne; deny who can that human control 
of affairs throughout the entire world is 
passing into the hands of the Christian 
powers — the whole trend of modern history 
is toward the unification of the race. 

Nations used once to look furtively at 
each other across the world. Now they live 
and move in one another's presence ; every 
day they meet on 'change, read their dis- 
patches, and strike their balances; they 
work and worship side by side, and live on 
the same block ; and twice within a few years 
Columbia has gathered them all to attend 
her birthday celebrations. It is hard to 
say just when nations " shall learn war no 
more ;" but they are already learning not to 
practice it any more, or but very sparingly. 
And by the very destructiveness of war, 
which will finally be its own destruction, by 
interchange of ideas, by international ex- 
change, by intercommunication, by growing- 
community of language, by reciprocity of 
interests that must be effectual ultimately, 
God is driving the nations into unity and 
" conquering a peace." 

5 

61 



Ube Celestial Summons 



Physically and socially, nay, intellectually 
and morally, the world is becoming one 
neighborhood, one dense, packed neighbor- 
hood. Who, do you suppose, is to assume 
the leadership of the whole vast aggrega- 
tion? More and more it is developing com- 
mon characteristics. There is a wonderful 
widening out, as well as intensifying, of 
human thought in every direction. It is 
not merely that particular spheres of knowl- 
edge and investigation are extending so 
rapidly and 3 r ielding such astonishing tri- 
umphs ; this is not the only or the chief 
thing to be noted. The special phenome- 
non of our times, it has been observed, 
goes far beyond this. It is the widespread 
interest now felt in what might almost be 
called universal truth, in all forms and 
spheres and departments of truth. It is 
nothing less than ' ' the whole realm of 
thought laid upon the whole mind of the 
whole world." All the great questions of 
humanity, all truth that man can take up 
into himself — his place in nature, what he 
is, what he can be, what he shall be — these 
are the fiery questions that kindle thought- 
activity around the world. 

And not only this inner thought-world is 

62 



Ube Celestial Summons 



seething and kindling like an electric flame, 
but the great world without — of events and 
things — moves along with this movement, 
this converging movement, that is drawing 
the lines of all life toward common centers, 
thrilling to common themes and throbbing 
with common impulses. God is welding 
the ends of the earth together; the em- 
bargoes of all time are giving way ; geo- 
graphical intervals are disappearing ; there 
is no more sea ; the great thought uttered 
at sunrise is the world's thought at sunset ; 
live issues are taken up and put upon their 
passage ; the world is being telegraphed 
and telephoned ; ideas, interests, sympa- 
thies, humanities are commingling and in- 
termingling, and all peoples are being mar- 
shaled within hailing distance of the cross — 
that is what it all means. 

And when they shall come within clasp- 
ing distance it will mean still more. When 
the nations and the continents throw the 
twining arms of a believing sisterhood 
around the cross, like a redeemed family — 
as sometimes we have seen a whole family 
converted, father and mother converted, all 
the sons and daughters converted, each dear 
one coming in to make the Christian fam- 

63 



Zbc Celestial Summons 



ily circle complete— when the very conti- 
nents are become such a family ; when not 
only cultured Europe and America look up 
adoringly into the Redeemer's face, with 
their thoughtful brows, but when brooding 
Asia falls at his feet singing, " Not Buddha, 
not Mohammed, but Christ for me, Christ 
for me ; once he came to me, and now I 
come to him ; I am clinging r clinging to the 
cross ;" when Australia is pouring the music 
of her thousand streams and forests upon 
his march ; when weary, long-stricken, but 
never-forsaken Africa, with that wonderful 
pathos in her eye — did you never notice it, 
the unspeakable pathos that is peculiar to 
the African's eye? — when she throws her 
unshackled, tawny arm around the dear 
Saviour's neck, with the tears of her long 
sorrow turned to tears of joy ; and when, 
like a saved family, they are all praising 
and singing and rejoicing together — then the 
world will understand what all these things 
meant that have been astonishing us so. 

They mean that the future of the race has 
something better than intemperance, war, 
oppression, the lust of gold, the mystery of 
evil, the carnival of sin and death. They 
mean that the Christ of prophecy and prom- 



64 



Zbe Celestial Summons 



ise, foreshadowed to Adam, announced to 
Abraham, revealed to Isaac and Jacob; 
whose rulership was prefigured in the in- 
stitutes of Moses and f oresung by David ; 
whose coming of one race, of one nation, 
of one tribe, of one family, in one place, at 
one time was predicted by the holy proph- 
ets; he, the Desire of all nations, whom 
still the wisdom of this world cannot under- 
stand, ever asking, ' ' Who is this that 
cometh, . . . traveling in the greatness of 
his strength? " — that he is coming up out of 
the wilderness to the mountain-top, with 
such a following, such an ultimate glory, 
that he shall see of the anguish and travail 
of his soul and shall be satisfied. Think 
you we shall have one murmur left for our 
sacrifices when we enter into his joy? 

But let us remember that he leads only, 
never compels or coerces. He leads, and 
the possibilities of a nobler and happier 
humanity that are waiting in him you and 
I will individually work out, and the Church 
and the race will work out, but only in free 
and voluntary following, heart and life 
singing, 

M Only thou our Leader be 
And we still will follow thee/' 



65 



Ill 



$ature'0 Interpretation oi 3m- 
mortality 



44 li a man die, shall he live again ? Job xiv, 14. 

"Search the Scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eter- 
nal life: and they are they which testify of me."-— John 
v, 39. 



Qftc Celestial Summons 



III 

Nature's Interpretation of Immortality 

What is really the testimony of nature 
on the question of immortality? What is 
really the scientific interpretation of that 
testimony? These inquiries will bring into 
view some unnoticed peculiarities in the 
present scientific attitude on the whole sub- 
ject of science and revelation. We have no 
quarrel with true science; but let every 
possible light be thrown upon the Scrip- 
tures, which we are to search for the mag- 
nificent treasure of eternal life. 

It is now upward of a century since the 
literary and political circles of Great Britain 
were thrown into an excitement unparal- 
leled of its kind by the publication of a se- 
ries of letters bearing the fictitious signa- 
ture of " Junius. " Men and measures were 
overtaken with a power and ferocity of at- 
tack rarely shown in the annals of partisan 
warfare. A splendor of literary genius that 
seemed to exhaust the facility of the Eng. 
lish tongue increased the excitement conse- 

69 



XCbe Celestial Summons 



quent on these letters, which appeared at 
frequent intervals through a space of three 
years, and remain one of the most extraor- 
dinary monuments of English literature. 

The author was unknown ; his tremen- 
dous assaults issued from out of total dark- 
ness, and were directed by a secret intelli- 
gence that included the plans of the court 
and the whispers of private individuals. 
More than forty eminent men have been 
severally charged or credited with the 
authorship. More than a hundred books 
and pamphlets have been devoted to its dis- 
cussion. No sooner does one theory begin 
to prevail than it is supplanted by a fresh 
one. Macaulay at last is positive ; but so 
had been a score of others. No detective 
device known to kings or critics has yet 
availed for the certain discovery of the 
authorship of the letters of Junius. 

But what was the literary form of the 
efforts to discover him? The only form 
they could have — analogy, comparison. 
When any man was singled out as the prob- 
able or possible Junius everything he had 
ever been known to write was put to the 
search to ascertain if there were any corre- 
spondences of style, any incidental agree- 

70 



Zhc Celestial Summons 



ments, no matter how slight. Every turn 
of thought, every minute phrase or expres- 
sion, was eagerly compared with what ap- 
peared in Junius, and the hundred years' 
controversy on this question has been mainly 
fought on the single field of analogy and 
comparison. 

Whether the author of nature is the 
author of the Bible is a question to be in- 
vestigated in the same way. Do nature and 
the Bible contradict, or do they correspond 
to, each other? Are there discoverable any 
peculiarities of style common to both, any 
fine coincidences and resemblances which 
might support the belief of a common 
authorship? Above all, does a careful com- 
parison of the two disclose such an identity 
or similarity of characteristic design or 
method proceeding along the same lines of 
thought and execution, such incessant re- 
currence to the same distinctive ideas, such 
a unique originality of conception and elab- 
oration, as not only to suggest the touch of 
the same hand here and there in many a 
natural law and phenomenon, in many a 
curious phrase and striking idiom, but ac- 
tually to reveal the same pervading, divine 
individuality throughout the amazing vol- 



71 



Ube Celestial Summons 

times of both nature and revealed reli- 
gion? 

Nature's testimony in support of religion, 
though in itself insufficient for the wants of 
men, becomes conclusive when viewed in 
connection with the Scripture revelation. All 
that nature affirms of the mysterious attri- 
butes and ways of God, the Bible assumes at 
the outset. And, from this starting point, 
the Bible formulates not a single great 
moral principle w y hich is not duplicated on 
the pages of nature. Even specifically 
Christian ideas and principles are thus veri- 
fied. The Bible introduces man as on pro- 
bation for even natural good ; and that pro- 
bation is limited. Law, with reward and 
punishment, extends over his whole earthly 
being. The principle of vicarious suffering, 
the effective, voluntary suffering of one in 
behalf of another, is illustrated in parents, 
patriots, philanthropists, and especially in 
all which the worthy endure for the un- 
worthy; without the mediatorial principle 
society could not exist. 

Minor and collateral doctrines of revela- 
tion are similarly illustrated, but I must not 
linger even to enumerate them. Physical 
nature is Christianity in matter. Include 

72 



I 



ZTbe Celestial Summons 



in the term " nature " the entire natural 
phenomena of human existence, and we 
may say that the elements of Christianity 
are variously distributed through nature in 
all directions, but only in God's second vol- 
ume — of Scripture revelation — are reduced 
to order and unified. 

Nature rises into more than suggestive- 
ness on the subject of a future life ; and it 
is along this line only — rather, along a sin- 
gle section of this line — that I propose to 
pursue the comparison of the two great 
volumes. A complete view would have to 
include the consideration of insect and ani- 
mal transformations, and various other famil- 
iar facts which are often quoted in proof. 
To avoid doing injustice to the general argu- 
ment for immortality, you will need to ob- 
serve, right here, that these customary argu- 
ments are entirely omitted now, for the 
purpose of presenting a single and special 
view which has never been presented, so far 
as I am informed, and as I have been assured 
by competent authority. 

On a general view, we must all admit that 
the system of existence, alike organic and 
inorganic, has a wonderful completeness. 
It is furnished with a fertility of resources, 

73 



Ube Celestial Summons 



with means of renewal and progression, such 
as, in the absence of a proper doctrine of 
immortality, might easily have suggested 
the ancient philosophic doctrine of metemp- 
sychosis, or transmigration of souls. It 
has no chasms nor seams. On every side it 
is rounded out with exuberant fullness. An 
infinite forecast has penetrated all its emer- 
gencies, forestalling one, minifying another, 
planing off excesses, filling up deficiencies, 
allowing proper play to the several wheels, 
but holding each part to the plan of the en- 
tire mechanism. Never stinted, never par- 
simonious ; neither cramped and narrow in 
its policy nor weak and faltering in its exe- 
cution ; insatiably planning and fulfilling, 
providing and perfecting — this, in general, 
is the method of nature, this is the spirit of 
nature. 

How wonderful the interaction of w r ant 
and supply, of function and organ, of adap- 
tation and application, the ratios and pro- 
portions that utilize every possibility and 
make the most of everything ! How admira- 
ably everything in nature is made to know 
its place, is subordinated to its peculiar 
environment, and subordinated again to 
other series, in ever-widening circles, till 



74 



TTbe Celestial Summons 



we pass from the minutest atomic unit to 
the whole illimitable universe ! Muscle and 
motion, the eye and light, the ear and sound, 
body and soul, land, water, and atmosphere, 
space and stars, forces and mediums, ele- 
ments and aggregations — how admirably 
fitted to each other ! 

As we ascend into moral and spiritual 
existence, which, for us, is the same ex- 
istence, only in higher form, the same 
characteristics repeat themselves — the same 
copiousness of supply, the same all-compre- 
hending foresight (or principle of continu- 
ous adaptation or concurrent energy, if any 
prefer to call it so), the same organizing, 
expanding, adapting, and provisioning of 
every faculty; with higher perceptives, 
higher objects, with nobler capacities, nobler 
work, with new emergencies, new resources. 

This merging or evolution of the lower 
order into the higher ; this overlapping of 
use upon use and grace upon grace ; this 
continual advancement from the old use and 
the last point reached to new uses and ulte- 
rior ends and fresh surprises ; this perennial 
blossoming of being, ever ripening, yet 
never ripe, salutes our joyous wonder alike 
in the material and the spiritual realm. 

75 



Uhe Celestial Summons 



Nature never loses the direction of its 
movement, but, whether revolving as mat- 
ter or spirit, remains parallel to its own axis. 
Throughout, the object is life. Through- 
out, a work is to be done, a plan to be ful- 
filled, crowding every thing from immediate 
use into ulterior use, the ulterior into the 
ultimate, the particular into the general, the 
general into the universal, under a law of 
life that works on without stint of means or 
pause of action. 

The soul is provided with the body, the 
body with the soul. Man is provided with 
the world, the world with man. Age is 
provided with childhood, childhood with 
age. Death is provided with life ; and here 
comes the first seeming interruption of the 
order, or the first question of its continuity. 
Is life provided with death ? In other words 
and to invert the order, does life belong to 
death, or does death belong to life ? 

Death follows life ; but is this in the way 
of rounding it out, fulfilling its order, and 
in a sense, supplementing it, as other thing 
supplement and give completeness to what 
they follow in the series we have been ob- 
serving ? If any are in haste to answer, 
1 i Yes, exactly in the same way and the 

76 



Ube Celestial Summons 



same sense," then I must rejoin — the sup- 
posed parallelism does not exist ; it is im- 
aginary. 

For, after all, thus far nature has made no 
full stops ; it completes at one point only to 
commence at another; the action supple- 
mentary to something that is is still prepar- 
atory to something that is to be. What if 
this method persists in death? Wherefore 
the question remains, Is death the final end 
in which life culminates, or is it the latest 
visible branch of the great, developing order 
through which life is graduated to a higher 
existence ? 

If death is the ultimate end, if life be- 
longs to it, instead of it to life, if death be 
not a transition to another life, then the in- 
finitely vital system of nature comes at last 
to a sudden and violent end. Its ever-on- 
ward march ceases that very moment. Its 
generously-flowing current stands still, and 
its waters are heaped up as a wall, in a man- 
ner that renders the miracle of the Red Sea 
or the Jordan an insignificant performance. 
No such miracle, no such violent distortion 
and dislocation of nature, joint from joint, is 
to be found elsewhere. The whole series of 
Bible miracles that so disturbs the skeptic's 

6 

77 



TTbe Celestial Summons 



mind sinks into commonplace in the pres- 
ence of this self-contradicting and amazing 
anomaly, this infinite unnaturalness. 

Then, when a man dies all nature dies — 
it reaches its end in him? The reply comes 
from certain quarters, " No, her vitality is 
continued in continuing the same series of 
changes without end, in repeating the same 
rounds forever. Nature deals with forevers, 
not with generations ; with races and spheres, 
not individuals. This is the greatness of 
her majesty, that she despises and buries 
us ephemerons, and with serene immobility 
carries on her work without missing us. 
The succession you call death is life with 
her ; the treatment you call temporizing is 
her mode of eternizing. Viewed from your 
standpoint, this is confusion ; from hers, 
eternal order." 

We are all familiar with this answer, 
which claims the right to satirize our views 
of life as sentimental, for the sake of teach- 
ing us to be scientifically logical. I cannot 
accept it as the logical answer it assumes to 
be. Its character as science seems as con- 
fused as our impressions are supposed to be 
sentimental. 

There is a science made up of technicali- 

78 



XTbe Celestial Summons 



ties without insight, without that profound 
philosophy or penetrating analysis which 
belongs to a sympathetic identification with 
nature's own moods and meanings ; a science 
that deals with the outwardness and form of 
things, and on some external particulars 
founds sweeping conclusions, as a novice in 
music, detecting the intentional discords of 
a great oratorio, might hastily set it down 
as a jangle without meaning or merit, and 
the great master as a mountebank. The 
science that does not apprehend the secret 
soul of nature is no science. It may laugh at 
sentiment ; but, if you wanted to ascertain 
the real genius of a given man, would the 
scholar who has explored his mind and the 
poet who has communed with his heart, or 
would the anatomist who has only dissected 
his arm, be the best authority for your pur- 
pose? 

Up to the phenomenon of death the 
general process of nature is continuously 
supplementing, enlarging, refining, repair- 
ing defects, indemnifying losses, apportion- 
ing more and better energy, scaling and 
mounting from round to round, working on 
through innumerable transitions to a larger 
life and nobler result. Her spirit is a spirit 



79 



Uhc Celestial Summons 



of endlessly diversified and ever-fulfilled 
promise ; and it is no reply to say that this 
promise is not to be interpreted in favor of 
individual immortality, but only of the du- 
ration of the species, or, if you will, of the 
spheres, of nature itself. Nature completes 
itself and comes to consciousness in the in- 
dividual man, as truly as in the whole race 
of men ; and, of course, the race presupposes 
the individual. With its laws and forces, 
its orbs and systems, its constitution, its his- 
tory — he requires it, and it all inheres in 
him. It takes its own method with him, 
and the outcome of that method is personal 
longing for, the universal nature-promise 
of, immortality. 

This promise is not fulfilled by successions 
of large masses of men or other existences, 
through any number of ages ; for the ques- 
tion involved is not the law of succession, 
but whether this law of succession is vital 
and vitalizing, winging from life to life, ac- 
cording to its uniform implications and tacit 
promise, or finally ingulfs all life in death. 
If nature fails of her promise herein, deludes 
and disappoints one, she does not escape 
the opprobrium by repeating the trick to all. 
She keeps her promise with the individual 

80 



TTfoe Celestial Summons 



man, or she keeps it with nobody. Plainly 
put it is this: either man is immortal, or 
nature is a lie. 

Death can be supposed to be only, at 
most, the reduction of existence to nonex- 
istence. But the birth of all life is a 
demonstration that nonexistence is no proof 
of continued nonexistence ; and it is ab- 
stractly more probable that that which once 
has been shall again be, than that that 
which never was would ever be. And so the 
man, dead, presents a greater probability 
that he shall live again, than there once 
was that he ever would live and be a man. 

These are some of the reasons for think- 
ing that the spirit and method of universal 
nature are in full accord with the Gospel 
announcement of individual immortality. 
At the same time, they are in full accord 
with the Gospel announcement that indi- 
viduals will fail of immortality, so far as 
holiness and heavenly happiness are ele- 
ments of that term ; that not all individuals 
will reach a blessed and heavenly immor- 
tality. 

Within the grand area of this vital move- 
ment of nature that we have been consid- 
ering, we know that myriads of natural 

81 



Utee Celestial Summons 



productions do perish — not to the vital 
plan, which still subordinates them to 
various uses, but to their own, to their 
normal uses and natural destiny; they 
perish to themselves and in themselves. 
Naturalists tell us that such objects are 
defective in their fitness for life ; for science 
holds the operations of fitness to be as abso- 
lute in the sphere of physics as religion 
holds it to be in the moral sphere. 

What is the law of evolution, as scientific- 
ally expounded, but the promise and proc- 
ess of life? And what is its elemental 
doctrine of " natural selection/' which 
proceeds on the axiom that, 1 ' in the strug- 
gle for existence, the fittest survives" — 
what is this but a limitation of that law, 
qualifying its action, while still fundamen- 
tal to its action? " Life/' says the popular 
scientist, ' ' is reached by a gradual evolu- 
tion of things from a lower to a higher 
order; this is the process of nature, there- 
fore of life." But ask him, "How do 
things rise from this lower to higher order?" 
" O, by a natural aptitude or capacity with 
which they are endued, or which inheres in 
them, for appropriating to themselves the 
food and the environment they need and 

82 



Hbe Celestial Summons 



for vanquishing what stands in the way of 
their obtaining them. ,, But what of objects 
that are not equally fitted to achieve these 
natural selections, to obtain the right food 
and surroundings ? i i Why they perish ; 
they do not survive; in the struggle for 
existence the fittest survive, and so nature 
rises." 

Now, sum this up. Life is the outcome 
of an endless process of evolution ; and one 
essential process of evolution itself is that 
of discarding what is not fitted to survive. 
In other words, according to the evolution- 
ists and by their own showing, life succeeds 
only by limiting itself, by a self-qualifying 
power, encouraging the better qualities, 
rejecting the worse and going on without 
them, and thus enabling itself to rise higher 
and higher. 

And without this limiting and eliminating 
action nature, in its highest forms, would 
be a failure. It survives in glorious beauty, 
strength, and excellence because, in the 
struggle for existence, the fittest survive. 
These views are accepted by many Chris- 
tian scientists. They are universally ac- 
cepted by the skeptical scientists of the 
day, who manipulate the theory in a way to 

83 



Ube Celestial Summons 



make it serve their own purposes of op- 
position to the Bible religion. 

But now, who can fail to see the striking 
correspondence between such a system in 
nature and the moral system of the Bible? 
How can any man consistently accept the 
one and cavil at the other? How can he 
fail to recognize in both the common author- 
ship of the same right hand of God? 

If Darwin calls natural existence a strug- 
gle, may not Christ call the way to eternal 
life narrow, and describe the entrance upon 
it as the being born again ? If the gospel 
of evolution announces the axiom that 1 ' the 
fittest survive," is the Gospel of righteous- 
ness to be discredited for proclaiming that 
without following holiness no man shall see 
the Lord ? When the renowned experts of 
physics keep reiterating that every year 
countless myriads of natural productions 
perish because of their unfitness to survive, 
is it ignorance and illiberality to believe 
that without repentance the wicked shall 
perish? Is the gospel of science, after all, 
so much more liberal and tender-hearted 
than the Gospel of salvation? We have 
heard a great deal about the partialism of 
religion ; but what shall be said now for the 

84 



Uhc Celestial Summons 



partialism of nature, or of science, its ex- 
pounder? Does the system of existence 
impose conditions on the development of a 
fly, of an animalcule, and recognize none 
in the development of a being who is to 
worship through everlasting years at the 
right hand of God? 

And so, on the very doctrines of ortho- 
dox Christianity that are the most assailed 
and targeted of all, does nineteenth-century 
science wheel right into line with the Holy 
Bible and the Christian Church — certainly 
the very last result the skeptical schools 
ever designed or thought of. It never en- 
tered into their thought, when they put 
forward their evolution theory to supersede 
the need of a Creator, that it would end in 
establishing doctrinal Christianity. This is 
the real state of the argument to-day, and 
our worst misfortune is that it is unknown 
to this hour to thousands of intelligent 
Christians — even to most of those who have 
entered the discussion — simply because, not 
having put this and that together, they have 
not opened their eyes to see the positions 
we have carried and that we are already in 
possession of the field. Nothing can dis- 
lodge us from it but our own uncalled-for 

85 



Ube Celestial Summons 



concessions to a foe who must otherwise 
surrender at discretion. 

The intention of nature is to be inferred 
from the sum of its whole movement. That 
movement primarily produces and perpetu- 
ates life. But the effect on any given created 
thing involved in the movement must be 
determined by the relation of the individual 
to the entire movement ; that relation may 
be antagonism, that effect death. Give an 
astronomer an arc of an ellipse, and he 
will tell you its whole form and period and 
in how long time that comet, revolving 
around the sun in a closed orbit, shall re- 
turn. But if the curve be a slightly differ- 
ent one he will tell you that the body is 
flying in a mighty hyperbola on which it 
will never return, an unclosed curve that 
carries it forever away. 

Does sin move in a closed orbit? May 
not its curve be the awfully outgoing sweep 
of the hyperbola? "Sin is the transgres- 
sion of the law; " not, therefore, as we are 
sometimes taught now, " the full spheral 
harmony and completion of it." As viola- 
tion of the law it is an element apart from 
God's order, and therefore is essential con- 
fusion and death. But for a moral and 



S6 



Uhc Celestial Summons 



spiritual nature in its highest development 
there can be no death. To every invading 
disease, to every darkened room where 
mourners gather and kindred weep, it can 
look calmly down and say, 

" There is no death ; what seems so, is transition.'' 

But that state which the Scriptures de- 
scribe as the being 6 ' dead in trespasses and 
sins " — that is death, the very death. By 
the joint testimony of nature and revelation, 
we shall survive that change which we call 
death, we shall each of us exist beyond the 
grave. But the Bible also declares that the 
wicked 1 ' shall be punished with everlasting 
destruction from the presence of the Lord, 
and from the glory of his power," that 
" these shall go away into everlasting pun- 
ishment; " and the teaching of nature is no 
less significant. Immortality, not in the 
sense of endless existence, but as combined 
with holiness and happiness, with heavenly 
existence — in this sense immortality is con- 
ditional. And it is the special office of the 
Gospel to make known to us and fulfill in 
us the condition, which is the personally 
indwelling life of Christ. Is it fulfilled in 
you to-day? Without this, when your pro- 

87 



Zbc Celestial Summons 



bation under the Gospel closes, is there not 
reason to fear that your sin will prove to be 
returnless flight in a moral hyperbola, for- 
ever away from God and the glory of his 
power? Opposite forces of grace and sin 
are acting upon you, and for the present, it 
maybe, you hesitate under their equilibrium ; 
but that equilibrium will soon cease, and 
you will sweep out upon your long career of 
darkness or of light. You are defining your 
orbit, and you are defining it for eternity. 

If you cannot believe God on the testi- 
mony of his word alone, believe him on the 
testimony of his universe. I am not preach- 
ing to you the doctrine of a tortured text, 
of some isolated and dislocated passage of 
Scripture. I am indeed preaching truths 
that pervade the whole system of the Scrip- 
tures ; but you can burn the Bible, and the 
infinite volume of nature, whose pages 
represent eternities and where worlds are 
but letters— that book will never revise its 
theology to escape our fagots. 



I 



i 

I 



IV 

&[)e Canfc of IIprtgf)tm00 



^Lead me into the land of uprightness^—Psalm cxllii, J0» 



XCbe Celestial Summons 



IV 

The Land of Uprightness 

If anything could enlarge the significance 
of the words of the text to our minds, or 
deepen their impressiveness, it would be 
to read them with the passage in which they 
stand: " Deliver me, O Lord, from mine 
enemies : I flee unto thee to hide me. Teach 
me to do thy will ; for thou art my God : thy 
Spirit is good ; lead me into the land of up- 
rightness/* 

"The land of uprightness " is one of the 
grand divisions of moral geography. 
"Where art thou?" said the Lord to 
Adam. And the question, equally appli- 
cable to everyone, is really as answerable 
by everyone. Morally, as well as physic- 
ally, man is and must be somewhere. 
There must be a moral place to which he 
properly belongs; there must also be a 
moral place to which he actually belongs ; 
they may be one and the same, or they may 
— not. But we can as easily think of body 
existing out of space as of a human soul, in 

91 



Zhc Celestial Summons 



the maturity of its voluminous powers, ex- 
isting out of a moral sphere orbing the dis- 
tinctions of right and wrong. ' ' Where art 
thou ? " the Lord interrogates man. ' 'Where 
art thou? " his conscience demands of him- 
self. So he has to take up this question, 
" Where am I?" 

I know — first of all — I know that I am. 
Being is mine ; with its capacities and laws 
and wants and capabilities and perils, being 
is mine. I may, with Job, open my mouth 
and curse my day, but that day shall not be 
blotted from the calendar of time, nor shall 
night and the shadow of death ever cover 
it. The destiny I could not elude still 
bears me on. The infinite mystery of be- 
ing holds me. And, since existence is 
mine, how shall I employ it ? How shall I 
escape its evils, enjoy its good? How, 
where, shall I spend it? I can only answer 
by finding, first, how and where I am spend- 
ing it ; where am I ? 

These questions open upon a man with all 
the lights and shadows of the universe. Ex- 
istence has no possibilities too glorious or 
terrible to speak in them. And the very fact 
of existence addresses them to us. All its va- 
ried good and evil repeat them. Everywhere 

92 



TTbe Celestial Summons 



these prospects of good, these portents of 
evil, chase each other through this profound 
of consciousness — I am. And in the moral 
consciousness the question of destiny, the 
where and what I shall be, is reduced to 
the question of character, the where and 
what I am, one's individual position in the 
moral geography of existence. It is of im- 
portance to what division of it one belongs. 

' 1 The land of uprightness " — this discloses 
the fact, which so many overlook, of the in- 
habitation of character. There are some 
people who apparently reach a kind of ag- 
gregate idea of themselves as existing from 
the geographical position in which they find 
themselves; from the political government 
that extends over it ; from a certain range of 
business they pursue in it ; from the house 
where they eat and drink and sleep; and 
from the relations they have to various ma- 
terial objects in this material round. They 
weigh life, as cattle are weighed, in the gross 
bulk. They seem to realize their identity 
by the aid of surroundings and circum- 
stances, and are thus fortunately assisted to 
a sensibility of their own existence. Happy 
for them that they have surroundings and 
circumstances, or they might never discover 

7 

03 



ITbe Celestial Summons 



that they themselves exist, though it may 
not be so much of a discovery, perhaps, 
when they have made it. 

The text reverses all this and says that 
character is my country, character is my 
home ; I have no existence outside of it ; in 
this I live and move and have my being. 
The upright man begins and ends the 
philosophy of life right here, with this su- 
preme issue — not what he has, but what he 
is. Others seek life without; he seeks it 
within. They are pleased with shadows; 
he accepts nothing but substance. They 
play with phantoms; he deals with solid 
reality. He begins in resolute self-honesty, 
which is the rarest and sternest form of the 
virtue. After all, there is nobody that people 
so love to cheat as themselves. Men pride 
themselves on their honest dealings with 
the world and their not owing it a dollar, 
who never paid the initiation dues of a true 
life before God. 

Now, when a man begins to discover that 
his character is his country, and his home, 
too ; that it is the soil on which he stands, 
the atmosphere he breathes, the window he 
looks out of, the table at which he fares, 
the bed on which he sleeps ; that it is every - 

94 



TTbe Celestial Summons 



where and everything, and he has nothing, 
and is nothing, beyond it ; that he is spirit- 
ually self-surrounded and self-occupied, and 
his soul can no more get beyond its integ- 
rity in the pursuit of happiness than his own 
feet can outrun themselves in a race — then 
the consciousness of being the wrong kind 
of man becomes a very troublesome one, 
unless he has reached that stage where the 
morbid and abnormal becomes naturalized, 
so that he can find more abstract happiness 
in living in a dirty house than in a clean 
one. 

This strange inhabitant of a strange coun- 
try, the upright man, the erect man, the man 
who walks straight, who lives by a rule and 
does his best to live up to it, the man who 
knows why God put man on two feet instead 
of four and balanced his head on his shoul- 
ders — worth our thinking upon is this man, 
governed as he is by a principle in all his 
transactions with time and eternity ; sincere 
at the heart's core with God and all the 
world; not singing and praying, reciting 
creeds and receiving sacraments, with a 
devout face heavenward, to offset the daily 
jealousy and trickery, the covetousness and 
selfishness, with which his hands and heart 



05 



Zftc Celestial Summons 



reach down earthward; not burying the 
humanities of life under a stately altar of 
religion, or offering an earthly and ma- 
terialistic morality as a substitute for it and 
a compromise; but recognizing God and 
man in one perfect rule of righteousness, to 
which he stands right up — upright. 

Low standards of rectitude all around 
him, apologies, temptations, oppositions, 
flatteries, frowns — none of these things 
move him. He veers neither to the right 
hand nor to the left. Like Nehemiah on 
the wall of Jerusalem, he is " doing a great 
work" and "cannot come down " to parley 
with the enemy; would rather lose the 
whole world than the equilibrium of his soul 
by any means. There he stands — all the 
world knows where to find him — bolt up- 
right. How all other distinctions among 
men sink down at last before the simple 
majesty of this — the only true dignity, the 
only true success, the sublime victory, the 
abiding, divine joy that no man taketh from 
him ! 

But we are to consider, not only the citizen, 
but his land, his nationality. "The land 
of uprightness" is the object of the soul's 
essential longings. There is no pilgrim like 

96 



Ube Celestial Summons 



the human soul — on the earth beneath no 
footstep so restless ; in the heaven above, no 
wing so tireless. Man's bodily marches 
hither and thither but feebly represent his 
incessant spiritual movement. 

How early this begins ! Your child teases 
the life out of you, you say, running into 
this mischief and that, now laughing, and 
now crying himself into spasms ; you won- 
der almost reproachfully why he can't be 
still and let you have a little peace some- 
times. But the world is full of novelty, and 
the child is full of life ; the great, mys- 
terious life-movement has started, and the 
wheels can't keep still; the longings of a 
human soul have begun, and the little 
wings must flutter before they fly. Think 
of it in this light, as illustrating the law of 
humanity's longings and unrest; that this 
is the way it acts in him ; that he will let 
you have rest when he has it — and it will 
almost make you weep with very sympathy, 
little tyrant though he is. 

The pilgrimage of youth draws on. 
" Fair lies the land ahead;" with eager 
eyes and hurrying feet we seek it ; but, ere 
we reach it, its sunshine has turned into 
shadow and its palaces have vanished away. 

97 



XCfoe Celestial Summons 



But man's middle pilgrimage, in the ma- 
turity of his judgment, in the disciplined 
earnestness of his affections — surely this 
shall not disappoint him. He is not quite 
so oversanguine now ; he can discriminate 
a little better between fancy and fact. The 
mirage of his journey has lost its power of 
illusion. He can detect the difference, now, 
between the floating vapor-lakes of sky, 
and the waters that flow earth-banked and 
green-swarded ; between the gorgeous mid- 
air cities whose thousand domes flash in the 
light of a feverish fancy, and the substan- 
tial possessions granite-founded and granite- 
faced. There is enough of mockery in the 
past of his pilgrimage, but surely his coming 
way is not all desolate. No, no. 

And yet, as he reaches wealth, with its 
heritage of care and envy and strife ; power, 
struggling even harder to keep what it strug- 
gled so hard to win ; fame, with its still 
unsatiated and chafed ambition ; love, whose 
sweet altar is too often hung with a viper- 
coil, and at best is ever built on the border 
of a ofrave — as thus he reaches on without 
overtaking his hope, or overtakes it only to 
be dissatisfied with all he has attained, and 
no less dissatisfied to turn away from the yet 



Uhc Celestial Summons 



unattained, we find that the furrows but 
deepen on his brow ; and the longings for 
dove's wings, that he may fly away and be 
at rest, become stronger and sadder. 

His pilgrimage seems all vain. His 
progress to each successive goal is made 
in dissatisfaction, to end in disappointment. 
Snares and pitfalls attend his steps, dangers 
darken around him as he advances in the 
worldliness and sinfulness of his way. He 
finds that over his whole earthly realm an 
inevitable doom is hovering and destruction 
is coming. He begins to feel as if he were 
in an enemy's land, and his soul to long 
for better things and to look up — when, 
behold, there dimly rises on its vision a 
solemn-gleaming border land, stretching 
along still and calm and glory-tipped, like 
a cloud -line in a golden air. "As a bird 
that wandereth from her nest, so is a man 
that wandereth from his place." But still 
the spirit knows its home, it tells its native 
shore, it feels the drawings of the Father, 
and cries, "Lead me into the land of up- 
rightness." 

I want you to observe this particularly — 
that it is aland, not a beautiful, but misty, 
region made up of all those spiritual sensi- 

99 



XCbc Celestial Summons 



bilities and moral aspirations which are 
represented, more or less, in every person's 
nature. There are people who call every- 
thing of this kind which they find in them- 
selves religion. Partly by any good quali- 
ties they may have on hand, and partly by 
a floating ideal of all loveliness and beauty, 
they succeed in creating in their own imagi- 
nations a kind of Christian fairy land, and 
then, by means of this brilliant etherealiza- 
tion, they attempt to transport themselves 
into the Christian life. I fear they are only 
treading air. I fear their sunny cloud- 
realm will come down with the earthly 
drawings, and they with it from their 
imaginary heights. 

The place the psalmist prays for is a 
land. It is a distinct, definite domain. It 
has its boundaries of separation from the 
common world in repentance of sin and in 
pardon and purification direct from God. 
It has its own peculiar conditions of en- 
trance and citizenship. For it is not open 
to the occasional excursions of transient 
travel scurrying through, fantastic flights of 
impulse riding in on a high steed of poetic 
fancy for a vacation-ramble just to look 
around and see the country. No man enters 

100 



XCbe Celestial Summons 



it but to become a citizen, and he is natural- 
ized the moment he steps upon its soil. 
' ' Know ye not that the friendship of the 
world is enmity with God?" The world? 
— that means society, wherein, and just so 
far as, it is opposed to God. ' 1 Come out 
from among them, and be ye separate, saith 
the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing - ; 
and I will receive you." 

It is a distinct, separate territory of the 
divine dominions, organized under specific 
rules of government revealed in the Bible, 
designed to endure all the wear and strain 
of actual life ; it is the land of uprightness. 
Yet, once over the border, we find it as vast 
and boundless as eternity. From justifica- 
tion and regeneration, as they are technic- 
ally termed, you can travel on in holiness, 
and when you have passed martyrs and 
overtaken angels your spiritual progression 
is rather commenced than ended. Yet, 
through all this boundless amplitude, it is 
simply one land of uprightness all the way 
along and stretching out forever. 

Albeit, it is a wide interval from the 
border to that interior landscape where the 
sun never sets, and the dew ever falls, and 
the leaf never withers — a wide interval, not 



101 



Uhc Celestial Summons 



of time necessarily, but of experience; but 
it well repays the journey, and all life truly 
under the divine leadings that is not yet led 
into it is being led toward it and seeks and 
tends to it. 

And well may ' ' the land of uprightness " 
be guarded from spoliation and sacrilege, 
even in our secret thought, for it is all a 
pure, pure land : " And I will put my spirit 
within you, and cause you to walk in my 
statutes, and ye shall keep my judgments, 
and do them. And ye shall dwell in the 
land that I gave to your fathers ; and ye 
shall be my people, and I will be your God. 
I will also save you from all your unclean - 
nesses." 

It is a land whose people are all royal, 
the sons of the infinite and eternal King ; a 
land of safety and of "the munitions of 
rocks," where the weak and danger-hunted 
soul, compassed about with songs of deliv- 
erance, abides under the shadow of the 
Almighty. No remorse, no infamy, no 
snare. "He that walketh uprightly walk - ; 
eth surely." " And the work of righteous- 
ness shall be peace ; and the effect of right- 
eousness quietness and assurance forever." 
"Violence shall no more be heard in thy 

102 



Zhc Celestial Summons 



land, wasting nor destruction within thy 
borders ; but thou shalt call thy walls Sal- 
vation, and thy gates Praise. . . . Thy 
people also shall be all righteous : they 
shall inherit the land forever." 

Free from the thousand distractions that 
infest every road of sin, " the meek shall 
inherit the earth ; and shall delight them- 
selves in the abundance of peace/' " And 
the ransomed of the Lord shall return, and 
come to Zion with songs and everlasting 
joy upon their heads : they shall obtain joy 
and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall 
flee away." Yea, "a delightsome land, 
saith the Lord of hosts." 

Where in life's earthly marches will you 
find anything to compare with this, of all 
lands God has set in the earth to be the 
types of better habitation? Go, search the 
glories of all lands. Linger in the bowers 
of vine-clad France or the wonder-varied 
landscape of wildly-blooming Switzerland. 
Bathe in the mellow light of Italian skies, 
when the evening chimes of Florence float 
out over the grove-lined banks of the Arno, 
the land of dream and song. Hide among 
the grand old fastnesses of Scottish glens, 
where Loch Lomond weds the spirit of the 

103 



1Xbe Celestial Summons 



mountains to her crystal heart. Pass the 
flashing gates of the Orient, where golden 
rivers softly flow and the glowing air is 
burdened with the perfume of Persia's rose 
or India's thousand sweets. vStand when 
the light of morning kindles on the eternal 
ice-crown of Mont Blanc, when sunshine 
and shadow leap from crag to crag, chasing 
each other from Alpine range to range till 
summit and slope and height and depth — 
far down to Jardin's isle of flowers in the 
midst of a glacier sea — and the whole won- 
drous valley of Chamouni are suffused with 
brilliant hues that mock the rainbow and 
flooded and fired with grandeur that seems 
unearthly and unreal. Let the isles of the 
sea and the ends of the earth show you the 
charm of every land, with all that is strong 
in nature's mountain castles or beautiful in 
her garden homes. 

Then come, walk in this land of upright- 
ness, and say if every glorious and blessed 
thing they represent is not spiritually real- 
ized here ; where alone the mountain of the 
Lord stands, and the everlasting hills are a 
shadow and a defense ; where grace sweeter 
than the cooling dew of Hermon falls on 
the fevered spirit ; where the green pastures 

104 



trbe Celestial Summons 



spread and the still waters flow ; where want 
never prevails, for " the Lord will pro- 
vide;" where darkness never reigns, for 
"unto the upright there ariseth light in 
the darkness," and "at evening time it 
shall be light;" where every common path 
of life smiles with hope and bursts into blos- 
som, and rivers of love are flowing through 
sweet valleys of peace, that still gleam up- 
ward to a " far more exceeding and eternal 
weight of glory." 

For whatever of evil or affliction remains 
here is "but for a moment;" and on this 
border, where the shining ones walk, only 
the illuminated mystery of death, as a hov- 
ering, golden mist, divides the land from 
very heaven. O blessed, delightsome land ! 
Who would not pray, " Lead me into the 
land of uprightness?" Only lead me! I 
ask not to be carried by thy resistless 
power ; I ask not to be borne aloft above 
the need of personal exertions and patient 
duties. I cannot but meet thy will. If by 
any means I can reach my true place in the 
sphere of moral existence and come into 
this blessed land of uprightness, I am will- 
ing to walk in the way step by step ; yes, 
and if need be, to take the first step now. 

105 



Zhc Celestial Summons 



Lead me, only lead me ! Earth is no ref- 
uge, no resting place. 

" Danger and sorrow stand 
Round me on every hand ; " 

but I know that God will ' ' never suffer the 
righteous to be moved/' 

' ' Deliver me, O Lord, from mine ene- 
mies : I flee unto thee to hide me. Teach 
me to do thy will ; for thou art my God : 
thy spirit is good ; lead me into the land of 
uprightness/' O God, inspire and hear this 
prayer ! 

106 



V 

Stye 0tar of 23etl)lef)em 



44 "When they saw the star, they rejoiced with exceeding great 
joy."— Malt, ii, 10. 



Ubc Celestial Summons 



v 

The Star of Bethlehem 

Blessed be God for the stars, shining as 
lamps, to light up a pathway for our 
thoughts to a world of purity and calm ! I 
do believe that even the worst man on 
earth is at times a little the better for them. 
It is very likely that their celestial influence 
may never have stayed the incendiary's 
torch or the assassin's dagger, but I do know 
it has sometimes chastened the wordling's 
sorrow and curbed the wordling's thought- 
less joy. 

I know a man who was once giving a 

brilliant entertainment at his residence, an 

entertainment protracted past midnight 

with merry songs and dances ; but, noticing 

fiom a window the holy serenity of the 

night without, he abruptly fled from the 

house, while the mazy dance went on, with 

its heartless din, and, gazing long and 

earnestly up at the stars that summoned 

into activity the better emotions of his 

nature, knelt there alone in his garden at 

8 

109 



Uhc Celestial Summons 



midnight, and wept and prayed like a 
child. 

I do not wonder that a religion like that 
of otir Saviour, associating to itself whatso- 
ever things are pure and lovely and of good 
report and lifting the vision of the soul to 
the quest of all things divinely good and fair 
—I do not wonder that such a religion has 
included the stars among its most sacred em- 
blems, to be the symbols of spiritual truths 
even brighter and holier than themselves. 

They symbolize the state of the blessed 
in a future life : ' ' They that be wise shall 
shine as the brightness of the firmament : 
and they that turn many to righteousness 
as the stars for ever and ever." The illumi- 
nating influence of Christ and of all his true 
disciples is expressed by the same emblem : 
" I Jesus . . . am the root and the off spring 
of David, and the bright and morning 
star; " and the morning star is promised to 
him "that overcometh." A star was also 
the prophetic figure used in describing the 
coming of the Messiah when the prophet 
Balaam lifted up his voice and cried, "I 
shall see him, but not now : I shall behold 
him, but not nigh : there shall come a Star 
out of Jacob, and a Scepter shall rise out of 

no 



Ube Celestial Summons 



Israel." That prophecy was wonderfully 
fulfilled when, nearly fifteen hundred years 
after its utterance, the wise men of the East 
were conducted to the presence of the infant 
Jesus by that splendid and beautiful emblem 
of our faith — the star of Bethlehem. 

Those wise men, it is believed, were cer- 
tain oriental astrologers, or magi, who came 
from the region of ancient Media, where 
the influence of their school was once un- 
bounded. The expectation of a Messiah, 
or Renovator of the nations, had probably 
extended among them, as well as among 
other oriental nations who shared it with 
the Jews; an expectation derived, it may 
be, through the Median extraction from the 
ancient Abrahamic line and kept alive by 
the traditions so widely disseminated by the 
various Jewish dispersions. As the centu- 
ries wore on with these Jewish traditions 
were probably associated many of the ideas 
and practices of paganism or semipagan- 
ism ; and the habitual Median worship of 
the Deity under the symbol of fire may 
have combined with these traditions of the 
coming of his Messenger, symbolized under 
the figure of a star, to suggest that rightful 
interpretation which, it seems, the wise 

111 



Ufce Celestial Summons 



men gave to the burning or luminous ap- 
pearance that announced the birth of Jesus ; 
or this interpretation may have resulted 
from some direct impulse of revealing 
power. I am merely sketching a general 
theory in regard to the identity of these 
wise men, without attempting to produce 
any historical evidence to support it. 

The star itself was evidently some striking 
luminous phenomenon, supernaturally pro- 
duced or controlled for the occasion, which 
announced the Advent to these meditative 
men and from time to time indicated the 
route they were to traverse, but certainly 
did not accompany them throughout their 
entire course. 

To us as to them, the star of Bethlehem 
is the type of Christ. It is associated in 
our minds with his coming and offices, with 
all the endearing recollections and impres- 
sions we have of the Gospel of the Saviour. 
To us the star of Bethlehem represents the 
truth of Jesus. It is the emblem of Chris- 
tianity. 

Throughout the world we view the cease- 
less marches of mankind. Every person 
has a certain life-path over which he travels. 
And over every path there is a star. Every 



113 



Ztbe Celestial Summons 



one of these countless life-roads of humanity- 
is lighted by some guiding idea, and the in- 
dividual follows it, and is led by it, and 
presses on in the way it directs him ; for it 
determines his way. It moves on, that 
ever-active, restless idea of his, and he 
hastens after it and moves toward it and 
takes his course in the world by the course 
of his own star. 

And yet there are not many of these 
guiding impulses in" life ; though every 
road has one, yet they are not many. They 
would form altogether a smaller constel- 
lation than the Pleiades. Life-ideas are 
easily summed up. The broadest aggrega- 
tion of human activities resolves itself into 
a few leading pursuits, and these compre- 
hend the whole movement of society. 
There are not many life-stars from which 
to make our choice. Yet the choice is 
made early, whatever it may be. Not 
many steps are taken in the march of life 
before some idea is in the ascendant, and 
rises above every other idea, henceforth to 
lead the way. 

That little child you may have observed 
near you, seemingly so thoughtless, so in- 
capable of planning and directing for him- 

113 



Zhc Celestial Summons 



self — that little boy very likely has already 
given his heart to one of those life-motives 
that impel the inhabitants of the world to 
their several roads. That boy, I say, has 
entered his path under the lead of some 
beckoning star, that already has power over 
him, and will have more by and by. No 
wonder the loving mother searches his sky 
to find it, with a tearful eye and an anxious 
heart. God bless the mother! God bless 
the boy ! 

And when the star is once hung in the 
spiritual firmament, and the soul has taken 
its course under it, it is wonderful how dear 
it grows, how its influence increases, how 
it holds its follower in its spell, through 
what hardships and dangers it will lead 
him, what desperate chances he will brave 
to follow it. How indifferently the )~oung 
man sits down to play his first game of 
chance, how little he cares whether he 
shall win or lose. See him a few years 
later. It may be fortune is gone, friends 
are gone, health is failing, life is waning, 
but he is playing on. Nothing can divert 
him ; he is in the power now of the star 
that he has chosen. O, not life itself can 
tell what it is to choose that life-star which 



114 



XLbc Celestial Summons 



hereafter, on the far plains of future years, 
is to sway the passions of the soul and reign 
supreme. It sheds its influence over one's 
habits, over his associations, over his char- 
acter ; it sheds its influence over his whole 
career, for happiness or woe. The light of 
sinful pleasure (I am speaking only of that 
which condemns itself to the understanding 
and the conscience as such), the star of sin- 
ful pleasure — how brilliantly it rises in the 
glittering youthful sky; how roseate the 
path over which it leads its votary! Yet 
who is happy there? Every flower of that 
path exhales the poison of death, every 
bounding step of that career leaps forward 
to a labyrinth of sorrows. And when the 
heart bleeds over the mockery of its own 
dreams — all remorse, all bitterness — yet the 
road reaches on, the star beckons forward, 
and the happiness to which this road never 
leads is sought, not by abandoning the 
road, but by continuing in it to the end. 
Reckless adventurer, your star is wrong. 
It cannot lead you to the goal you seek. 
What have you to gain by advancing? You 
are under a false star and on the wrong road. 
Turn — that is your remedy — turn from 
them, and God will show you a better way. 



115 



Ube Celestial Summons 



Like this, also, is the star of selfish and 
"unhallowed ambition. Ambition is always 
sinful when it points to worldly success as 
the supreme object in life, no matter 
whether to wealth or fame. This star 
is ever pointing, ever promising. Be not 
deceived by its gorgeous ray. Ambition is 
a stern thing to follow. To follow that star 
effectually and only, a person must wrap 
himself in sullen insensibility to everything 
else. For everything else he must keep an 
averted eye, a closed ear, a heart congealed 
and insensible. He must learn to curb his 
noblest impulses, he must pass by a thou- 
sand sources of innocent happiness that are 
scattered along his way, he must harden his 
humanity on the anvil of his own selfish- 
ness, stroke upon stroke, and consent to be 
as mean and as miserable as the conditions 
of success may require — that is, if ambitious 
success be his only object. And then, for 
one that reaches the goal, ten thousand 
stop in mid pursuit, drop into their graves, 
and die cursing their star. " But the one 
reaches it," you say. Yes, but think at 
what a terrible cost — as one has sung 
who knew too well the truth of what she 
sang: 



TZhc Celestial Summons 



" Few think of life's beginnings. Men behold 

The goal achieved— the warrior, when his sword 

Flashes red triumph in the noonday sun ; 

The minstrel, when his lyre hangs on the palm ; 

The statesman, when the crowd proclaims his thought 

And molds opinion to his gifted tongue. 

They count not life's first steps, and never think 

Upon the many miserable hours 

When hope deferred was sickness to the heart." 

Pleasure, ambition — heaven pity their 
madness who trust in such stars for protec- 
tion ! O, would we but consent to acknowl- 
edge what humanity really is and always has 
been under these illusive leadings, how bit- 
ter the disappointment and how intolerable 
the unrest their evil beams have shed upon 
the whole earth since it began, and then, as 
by a miracle from heaven, could we be made 
sensible that they shine with a ray as little 
kind and true for us as they have shone for 
countless others, and will reward our confi- 
dence in the same inevitable way, it does 
seem to me we should say, ' 1 These are all 
evil stars;" that we should say, ' 1 Your 
spell is broken." We should bid them be- 
gone into their own nothingness. And if 
you imagine that their disappearance would 
leave something of a gloom and darkness on 
your way, be certain it would not be long 

117 



Zhc Celestial Summons 



before you should see another star arising, 
and behold it — O, with what exceeding great 
joy — the star of Bethlehem. 

For it is a divine star. Not ' ' of the earth 
earthy " is the star of Bethlehem ; not shoot- 
ing up from the baleful, noxious elements 
of the world's depravity and unrest. No 
sooner does a man behold that star than he 
rejoices with exceeding great joy because of 
its benign and holy origin. It is the star of 
the Highest, and leads to him. It will guide 
a man to the place prepared for him in the 
plans and purposes of God. It kindles a 
new life, whose motive is sweeter than pleas- 
ure and nobler than ambition. 

There is one divine Star for man. Two 
could never have been either given or re- 
quired. There is one God, and the light of 
his whole divinity is in that Star. Take it 
as your guide, and the world has no more 
tyranny over you; the life of freedom is 
begun, for freedom comes with truth. That 
only is the true divine Star of humanity 
which shines over the waste and wreck of 
life, brightening the wilderness with beauty, 
glowing like a beacon to the perishing, and 
thus becoming the quenchless signal of God's 
interest and tender care for man and man's 



118 



Tihe Celestial Summons 



utter dependence upon God for light and 
happiness and safety. 

The star of Bethlehem is a star of purity. 
Its peculiar excellence is that it leads straight 
away from sin, with all its entanglements 
and sorrows. It sheds through the soul, not 
only the light by which it perceives its dan- 
gers, but the strength by which it overcomes 
them. It shines down into purified affec- 
tions, an upright heart, a guiltless con- 
science, and discovers a character sincere 
and true that invites the open light of heaven. 
It beholds a man a new creature in Christ 
Jesus, a being who rises and flings away his 
weakness and, in the light and strength of 
that good star, presses bravely forward — the 
song of his march being ever ' ' Nearer, my 
God, to thee." 

It is a star of love. Give an individual 
every other good the world affords ; surround 
him with the magnificence of fortune and 
invest him with the brilliancy of fame ; and 
yet deprive him of the sympathy and affec- 
tion of his kind — and what is life to such a 
one ? Again, let his sunny future depart, 
his way become a rugged scene of every 
hardship and privation, but leave him the 
consoling sympathy and affection of his 

119 



Uhc Celestial Summons 



fellow-creatures, and with what strange 
strength he can bear up under adversity. 
From the child to the pilgrim of threescore 
years and ten — for the heart that is stricken 
with the sorrows of years and the approach 
of its mortal fate is not less sensitive than 
in the gala day of j^outh — from the cradle to 
the coffin how strangely intense are these 
longings, and how much of the history of 
life's joy or sorrow is bound up with them ! 

Well, thank God, the star of Bethlehem is 
a star of love, true, changeless, eternal love ; 
every ray is a warm love-glow from heaven. 
I believe I may safely assert that the very 
first impression of a sinful man when con- 
verted is a strange, undefinable conscious- 
ness of infinite love ; love intense and all- 
pervading, and himself, as well as the uni- 
verse, the object of it ; love he cannot de- 
scribe, cannot comprehend, and of which he 
never before had conceived an idea ; but love 
now suddenly felt flowing toward him and 
filling all around him. And so he goes on. 
This conviction, this consciousness, becomes 
the abiding consciousness of the soul. 

You cannot make him believe now that 
he is all neglected and uncared for, a friend- 
less exile in a world of untempered coldness 

120 



Ube Celestial Summons 



and barrenness ; that for him no fountain 
of living sympathy gushes unceasingly, no 
guardian tenderness watches over him amid 
the sorrows and mysteries of his way. He 
feels that, if he never had a friend before, 
he has one now in a sin-pardoning God. He 
has found in Jesus " a Friend who sticketh 
closer than a brother." He realizes the 
power and presence of infinite love ; he 
feels it ever beating against his heart in 
great, earnest tides of communion ; he comes 
into intercourse with a tender and unchange- 
able sympathy, and feels that on his heart 
and on his way are lavished the unsearch- 
able riches of the affection of heaven, the 
loving guardianship of angels and of God. 
Perhaps some of you seek from human ties 
the brief consolation they can offer you for 
the loss of this ; yet the time will come when 
it shall be worth more than all the world 
to feel that powerful presence of undying 
love which the star of Bethlehem alone can 
shed upon your spirit. 

Is it not a star of peace? Holy affections 
reign in the heart; holy love reigns over it, 
reigns everywhere; there is such calm, 
sweet trusting and resting in God. And if 
that is not the " Star of peace to wanderers 



Zhc Celestial Summons 



weary " which produces this, can you point 
me to such a star? 

Yet Herod learned of the peaceful star 
and was afraid, and all Jerusalem with him 
— the one from political ambition, the others 
from political cowardice ; a jealous monarch 
and a truckling people. It might have been 
expected that the Jewish people would re- 
joice to see that day ; that, eagerly expect- 
ing the Messiah, they would be but poorly 
able to disguise their gladness or keep back 
the impetuous tumult of their joy. But the 
king grew alarmed, and the people fright- 
ened. That was the conclusion of the whole 
matter for them. What did they care that 
a Star had risen in its beauty that should 
shed a new light upon the night of the 
world, and that future ages and generations 
should bless? A low ambition, a sordid 
motive, eclipsed all its glory and left them 
in darkness and sin. 

The influence that Christianity actually 
exerts upon us depends on the way we re- 
ceive it. Why are you not rejoicing to-day? 
Why does not the advent of such a Saviour 
fill your soul with unspeakable joy? Is it 
not because, through the blinding mists of 
earthly interest and motive, you look at the 

122 



Ube Celestial Summons 



peaceful star and are troubled ; at the holy 
star and continue in sin ; at the star of rev- 
elation and Christ is not revealed; at the 
star of redemption and feel you are not re- 
deemed? It saves us and blesses us and 
brings us joy only as we dare believe in it, 
dare go forward and follow it — no matter for 
Herod or the Jews. 

And thenceforth, whatever else may come, 
we have peace. Though " storm after 
storm rises dark o'er the way," this troubled 
world never yet saw that storm which the 
star of Bethlehem could not penetrate, 
chasing away the vapors and showing a clear 
way up into victory. And when the breath 
of life shall fail, the eye of faith undimmed 
shall see that star of immortality standing 
over and piercing the mists of the valley. 
Yes, the dear old star is there. One more 
feeble shout inspired by its glory in this land 
of tombs and tears, and the next shall be 
given in the land that is tearless and tomb- 
less forever. 

The historical circumstances connected 
with the text have sometimes suggested an 
analogy to the proper way of seeking 
Christ at the present time. One presenta- 
tion of this analogy I may be able to trace 



Ubc Celestial Summons 



somewhat in general form, or at least to 
follow the thread of the general thought. 

But first, perhaps, one sorrowfully says, 
" What if, like the wise men, I should set 
out to seek Christ, but should not, like 
them, find him? What if I should under- 
take to be a Christian and find afterward 
that I was not, or could not be, a Christian? 
This is the reason why I cannot see my way 
clear to follow the star. I would start for 
Christ to-day if I knew I should find him." 

Another says, more sorrowfully still, ' ' I 
must confess I have my doubts at times 
whether there be any Christ, or whether 
Christianity be true. It probably is, for 
I see many evidences in its favor ; but how 
can I act on the evidence of probability? 
I must have positive certainty to start with. 
This is the reason why I cannot see my 
way clear to follow the star. Could I be- 
hold it with all the clear and certain convic- 
tion that others speak of, what could hinder 
me for one moment from following it!" 

My friend, does it occur to you when you 
say this that you are requiring God to 
adopt a plan, in moral and spiritual things, 
which is entirely new to him and which he 
has not adopted in anything else? In all 

124 



Ube Celestial Summons 



your earthly pursuits and interests must 
there not be beginnings, often very feeble 
and doubtful beginnings — acceptance of 
the fainter light till the higher and more 
perfect light arises by degrees; patient 
exercise of the lesser measure of strength, 
that gradually increases with the work done 
and proportions itself to the work that is to 
be done ? Do you not know that this is the 
law of all human achievement? In your 
education, did not this law lead you from 
class to class, from school to school? In 
your business, has it not led you from one 
stage of fitness and qualification to another, 
from one degree of success to another? 

You recognize this law in everything 
earthly; why do you object to it in religion, 
where it is equally natural, equally inevi- 
table? 4 'Seek, and ye shall find." But 
in religion you insist upon finding before 
seeking. If any man will do the will of 
the Father — that is, so far as he perceives 
it — " he shall know of the doctrine, whether 
it be of God." Now, a certain degree of 
the Christ-light has been shining on you 
from your childhood. Have you been at- 
tentive to it, have you followed its beckon- 

ings? Or have you stood still and waited 
9 

125 



Hbe Celestial Summons 



for the star to advance, turning away your 
eyes and expecting the light to grow? Is 
not this simply expecting God to reverse his 
known methods in the whole system of 
human life? 

Sit down, O magi, wise men of the East, 
dusty and worn with the long journey from 
the Orient, and tell us your experience in 
our humble Christmas meeting to-day. 
When you saw the star arise, why did you not 
employ your astronomic skill to resolve it 
into some different meaning? Were you 
sure of having hit the right interpretation, 
too sure to even say, ' ' If we could only 
know?" Why did you connect it with the 
Star that was to arise out of Jacob— itself 
but a misty prophecy? How could you 
consent that proud philosophy should be 
yoked to the service of Jewish tradition, 
and stake your scholarly fame on the result ? 
What said the dear ones of your homes, how 
laughed your brother scientists in the re- 
treats of learning, how stared your fellow- 
countrymen when the camels were laden 
with precious gifts and you set forth on the 
wild chase of a star — simply because the 
evidence of probabilities was in favor of its 
supernal character and indications ? 

126 



Ube Celestial Summons 



Tell us, O magi — for the way was long 
and weary — when the arid plains stretched 
before you, when ravine and river inter- 
cepted your steps, when nation after nation 
melted out of view in the growing distance, 
when your guiding light at times flickered, 
burned low, was lost in the glare of an 
Eastern sun, through roving bands that 
skirted the way, through hardships, perils, 
and deaths, did not your hearts falter and 
policy join its protest with philosophy 
against such an enormous undertaking? 
And when your confidence had been 
strengthened by new tokens as you drew 
near, by prophecies, traditions, gradually 
blending into confirmations along the way, 
when at length your journey ended at the 
manger palace and you knelt in the presence 
of the royal Babe — tell us, O wondrous 
travelers after truth, could you say from the 
depths of your hearts, " It is all we asked; 
we are satisfied?" 

Methinks I hear the voice of sages break- 
ing the hush of wisdom's worship, " What 
care we that the star rose dim, and bright- 
ened only as we gazed, and moved only as 
we moved with it? What tears have we to 
shed for the humility that believed, since 

127 



Ufoe Celestial Summons 



faith is become knowledge and we know 
whom we have believed? What sorrowful 
retrospect have we to take of the road, 
though long and arduous, that led us to the 
truth? Lo, we have seen the Promised of 
God, we have hailed the Deliverer come. 
We have clasped the feet that shall stand 
on the summit of the world's empire, we 
have held the hand that shall sway the 
scepter of an everlasting kingdom. Satis- 
fied? Witness the fervent kneeling, the 
soulful homage, the lavished offerings. We 
have frankincense for the God, and gold for 
the King, and embalming myrrh for the 
Man who is born to die for men." 

They sought and found. And when you 
shall behold the Christian star only to fol- 
low it, from however feeble beginnings, 
through whatever difficulties and obstacles 
that may throng the way, then shall more 
than their great joy, ' ' all joy excelling, " the 
joy of the spiritual Christmas, come into 
your heart — that joy of the inner Advent 
which no man taketh from you. 

128 



VI 

tUatrijhtQ mt\) Cljrist one §om 



a "What, could ye not watch with me one hour ? 
Matt* xxvi, 40* 



TLhc Celestial Summons 



VI 

"Watching with Christ one Hour 

Our Lord, when he tittered the words of 
the text on the night of his betrayal and 
arrest in Gethsemane, had already left the 
main body of the disciples at the entrance 
to the garden, saying, "Sit ye here, while 
I go and pray yonder." Peter, James, and 
John are honored with a position still nearer 
his person, and with them he still continues 
to advance, until they also are left behind 
with the injunction, " Tarry ye here, and 
watch with me." 

" And he w r ent a little farther." Deeper 
than the nearest of his followers he must 
enter into that mysterious moral conflict in 
which the mediatorial battle was now to be 
fought out. I may not speak of that. A 
mystery of God drops down, like a sum- 
mons to silence, over that scene. 

M 'Tis midnight ; and on Olive's brow 
The star is dimmed that lately shone: 

Tis midnight; in the garden, now, 
The suffering Saviour prays alone." 

181 



Uhc Celestial Summons 



Not content with passing this ordeal near 
his disciples, he presently repairs to their 
side to cheer and strengthen them by his 
presence, or to be cheered and strengthened 
by their sympathy. Needless office for 
them, vain hope for him — they are asleep ! 
Worn with fatigue and heavy with sorrow 
as they were, none could be more ready 
than the Master himself to plead these ex- 
tenuating circumstances in their excuse. 
Gently he said, " The spirit indeed is will- 
ing, but the flesh is weak." Nevertheless, 
the sharp, unnatural contrast with his own 
amazing struggle must have cut his great 
soul to the quick. It seems to have done 
so, and the lips that a moment before had 
cried so meekly, " Not my will, but thine, 
be done," were now forced to give utter- 
ance to that exclamation of sorrowful sur- 
prise, " What, could ye not watch with me 
one hour? " 

But was not the whole scene prophetic 
and emblematic? How few watch with 
Christ ! The strange spectacle that fills us 
with wonder and shuddering on the misty 
slope of Mount Olivet repeats itself daily. 
Broadly cast upon all the perspective of his- 
tory are the ever-contrasted forms of the 

132 



Uhc Celestial Summons 



tireless, sleepless, struggling, overcoming 
Christ, and the palsied sleepers who fear or 
faint in the dark hour of the great and 
agonizing tribulation of the regeneration. 

The Christian doctrine is that in the more 
than world-convulsing war between the great 
forces of good and evil Christ has overcome 
for man ; that in that very Gethsemane and 
on the morrow's Calvary he won the victory 
for our human race ; and thenceforth all 
history was reduced to a continuous strug- 
gle for the progressive application of the 
benefits already achieved — for the applica- 
tion, simply, of what he had already done 
for us, Our warning is limited to this. 

But in every stage of this continuous 
struggle that goes on through the centuries 
the ancient scene is repeated to our view. 
If evil attacks good, if error and unbelief 
and selfishness make war upon truth and 
faith and devotion, it is Christ who suffers, 
it is Christ who wrestles, it is Christ who 
sweats the great blooddrops of his humili- 
ation. And if good overcomes evil, if moral 
and religious progress is achieved, it is 
Christ who goes into the battle, it is he 
who conquers. 

Now, what every individual needs pri- 



Ubc Celestial Summons 



marily is a proper basal ground where he 
may stand that he may watch against the 
evil in defense of the good and true. And 
in Christ alone can this be found. Obliter- 
ate him from this "conflict of ages," and 
there is no solid ground on which to rest 
your feet. Where else will you seek such 
ground? In science? It can explore num- 
berless physical and mental phenomena, but 
it can give no clew to the moral phenomena 
in which you are supremely interested. Its 
microscope cannot investigate the soul. Its 
telescope cannot reveal God. Its object is 
not virtue or holiness, but knowledge. Its 
character is not moral, but intellectual. 
vScience is a result of mental processes, and, 
humanity being greater than its processes, 
science cannot save it. 

Will you seek the ground for your life- 
watch in history? History is but an aggre- 
gation of facts and, at best, can only refer 
you to philosophy; and philosophy has never 
yet developed, from all the materials it has 
accumulated and all the data it has con-, 
suited, a complete, united system which, 
with any shadow of plausibility, can be 
called truth. Philosophy herself is all in 
doubt and confusion, having no faith by 

134 



Ubc Celestial Summons 



which to invite faith, no certitude, and 
utterly unable to say to any one man, 
" Come unto me, and I will give you rest." 

If you apply to the human religions how 
much have you bettered yourself, what ad- 
vance have you made ? Will you hold your 
vigil with Confucius in the cloud of his un- 
authoritative and shadowy wisdom? Will 
you hold it with Buddha in the gloomy com- 
placency of eternal torpor? Or with Mo- 
hammed in his senseless trifling with ori- 
ental extravagance and sensualism? 

And when this round of human systems, 
disappointing and disheartening, has been 
completed, what a relief it is to hear the di- 
vine-human Sufferer of Olivet say, ' ' Can ye 
not watch with me?" O, the heart-touching 
tenderness, the thrilling hopefulness, of 
that w^ord "with me!" Here, at last, we 
may watch with and feel confidence in Him 
who is our champion, for here is every- 
thing to inspire our confidence — truth and 
power and love and dominion ; here is 
Christ, so sweetly human, so strangely di- 
vine, watching for us, watching with us, 
rising into victory from humiliation, and 
opening heaven for us with his cross. 

You are ignorant? He teaches you. You 

188 



Zhc Celestial Summons 

are guilty? He forgives you. You are pol- 
luted? He cleanses you. You are weak? 
He strengthens you. You are comfortless? 
He makes his abode with you. You are 
poor? He is a sufficient treasure. You are 
sick and dying? He is the resurrection and 
the life. You take him to your heart — 
rather, he takes yoa to his own — your 
troubled mind sinks to rest, you cease seek- 
ing for yonv own good, and begin to seek 
for that of humanity. So he hangs the em- 
blems of his divinity on the circles of the 
heavens. "Look unto me," he cries, "and 
be ye saved, all the ends of the earth/' 
You look out upon the travail of the world, 
you await the result of the mediatorial 
struggle, and you know that Christ is all in 
all. 

Now, under such circumstances, having 
reached such a vantage ground, it is natural 
for many to feel that the most important 
work on their part is done. Their sym- 
pathies are on the right side, they confide 
in the competence of Christ to overcome. 
They feel they are on the right ground; 
they have a well-appointed watch. They 
have caught new glimpses of the Master's 
divinity ; they have seen how the winds and 

136 



XTbe Celestial Summons 



the waves obey him ; they have come to re- 
pose an easy confidence in the sufficiency of 
the great Miracle-worker in every emer- 
gency. They are contented. They fall 
asleep. If they were the sworn enemies of 
Christ they would openly oppose him. If 
they were his dissembled enemies they 
would be astir to betray him. But they are 
neither. They are simply overcome by 
moral drowsiness. The keener sympathy of 
their nature is lulled asleep, and their moral 
vigilance seems to be lulled asleep with it. 

And what if He who wrestles so mightily 
near by against every deadly enemy of man 
were also to lie down and sleep? What 
would become of their salvation, what would 
become of humanity, if the Saviour should 
grow weary of struggling in behalf of an 
indifferent or a hostile world, and slumber 
should close his eyelids, too? My brothers, 
shall we be prayerless while Christ is pray- 
ing, heedless while he is watching, with- 
draw our sacrifices from his service while 
his sacrifice is a continual offering, let our 
eyes close in ill-timed weariness or easy 
confidence while the eyes of the ever- 
watchful Christ look out, fixed and intent, 
upon all the movements and marches and 



137 



TTbe Celestial Summons 

countermarches of opposing agencies in this 
world ? The tireless energy that the Son of 
God and Son of man flings into the great 
conflict, and the glorious achievement that 
crowns it, will yet come back to the sleeping 
disciple with the reproach, 1 ' What, could ye 
not watch with me one hour? " 

Is this an age to justify such apathy? Is 
it from modern infidelity the Church derives 
this listless example ? Have the worldliness 
and wickedness and grossness of these times 
grown so indifferent and easy-going that 
Christian discipleship can afford to cry out 
into the night 1 1 All's well," and fall asleep 
at its post like a drunken watchman ? No, 
this is not such an age. The world, how- 
ever wicked, is wakeful and earnest — des- 
perately earnest. It is thoroughly aroused 
to do what it can in its own defense. It 
coaxes and threatens, it laughs and frowns, 
it cries " Peace" and wages war ; it plies 
its wiles, it bestirs itself, it puts on strength, 
goes out of its way in wickedness ; it is at 
infinite pains to be in error. Something 
has touched it, has broken its lethargy for- 
ever. It seems to feel upon its face the 
breath of that prayer of agony of the Son 
of God, 



138 



Ube Celestial Summons 



And the terrible earnestness of that 
prayer has moved the world to its founda- 
tions. It is in all the elements, penetra- 
ting, infiltrating, and sifting through the 
spiritual atoms of humanity, setting the 
whole moral creation throbbing and quiver- 
ing with its own earnestness. Those watch- 
ing eyes of Gethsemane, that burn like fire 
through the darkness and through the 
battle night of ages, O how they search us ! 
They look upon our work, they scan our 
motives, they interrogate us when we stand 
up to preach and when we kneel down to 
pray, they interrogate us in the house of 
God and in the marts of trade. There is no 
legitimate occupation which, if followed 
right along, in the sight of God, will not 
lead us into the presence of the wrestling 
Mediator, the lonely Watcher in the garden 
on the way to the cross and the tomb and 
the resurrection and ascension glory, and 
which will not lead on to that outpouring 
of the Holy Spirit and that baptism of fire 
upon the whole Church which he will send, 
even as the Father hath sent him into the 
world. 

Or the disciple may be heavy with sorrow. 
He finds himself in a new position. It is 

18Q 



Ube Celestial Summons 



not now as in the communion of that last 
supper when he feasted with his Lord ; it is 
not now as when he walked and talked with 
him, and sang hymns in the ecstasy of his 
visible presence, ere yet they had reached 
the Mount of Olives. From all this he 
finds himself transferred to a new and 
strange ordeal. He shudders in the sur- 
rounding darkness of his way ; he trembles 
at the trial near. And most disconsolate is 
he that he cannot see his Lord. Surely he 
is a Saviour that hideth himself. 

Ah, brother, he hath gone "a little 
farther/* He hath entered deeper into the 
councils of the Father than hast thou. But 
though thou canst not see him through the 
darkness, hearken, and thou shalt hear him 
praying for thee that thy faith fail not; 
praying, not that thou shouldest be taken 
out of the world, but kept from the evil, 
and at last be with him to behold his glory. 
Ah, Jesus is withdrawn from thee only 
about a stone's cast. He will come to thee. 
Let him not find thee sleeping. 1 ' What I 
do thou knowest not now ; but thou shalt 
know hereafter/' And it is wonderful, 
sometimes, how short is the interval to that 
" hereafter," how soon those kind workings 

140 



Uhc Celestial Summons 



of his providence begin to display them- 
selves. 

A reflective author has said that with 
most men between the ages of eighteen and 
twenty-five or twenty-eight there are actu- 
ally crowded more cares, changes, vicissi- 
tudes than in all their after years together; 
and adds that most persons, in taking a 
retrospect of life even at forty, are able to 
trace the divine benevolence in all the 
afflictive series. Perhaps the discovery is 
not so generally the case ; but to Christian 
faith it sometimes requires no such lapse of 
years. 

Yet I must allow that even the Christian 
sufferer does not often enter upon his 
sufferings with very distinct impressions of 
the mercies they conceal. The man of 
business does not see, when his fortunes go 
down and poverty and want come staring 
him in the face — he does not see that he 
may emerge from this sore trial with new 
knowledge and rejoicing with new joy that 
he hath in heaven a better and more endur- 
ing substance. The invalid does not know 
when he goes into the chamber of his long 
sickness what more than mortal healing is 

awaiting him there. The mother docs not 

10 

j u 



Zhc Celestial Summons 



know, as she lays her child away in the 
dust, with its white hands folded and the 
flowers on its bosom— she does not yet 
understand how, through this aching void 
of her heart, the Saviour is preparing to 
come in with a sweeter presence and a 
deeper and holier communion. 

These are the after-discoveries of faith, 
but to the Christian it does not usually take 
so very long to make them ; while there are 
other revelations for which we must needs 
wait through the longer vigil of life. But 
they are sure to come to us in due time. 
Let us, then, not fear the darkness. Let 
us go forth with our Lord, from the feast to 
the watch in the olive shade. Enough, 
blessed Jesus, that thou art there, that 
w T hat thou doest we shall know hereafter. 
We shall be kept from the evil. We shall 
behold thy glory at last with the Father. 
We can watch our little hour. 

Besides our own personal sorrows, there 
may be occasions when the omens of the 
times portend evil to the Master and his 
mission ; when the chief priests of corrup- 
tion are at work, and the scribes come forth 
with their parchments, and the officers with 
their bludgeons, and intrigue is busy, and 

142 



Uhc Celestial Summons 



power is clamorous, and perfidy and per- 
jury are greedy on the track of the Son of 
man. There have been many such oc- 
casions. But, O ye of little faith, know 
this — there is no contest into which the 
Christ is called to go but he emerges from 
it with new trophies of his power. So he 
returned from his contest with Roman 
idolatry, with Judaism, with numberless 
customs and institutions of pagan antiquity, 
with mediaeval superstition, with papal tra- 
dition, with rationalism, with ecclesiastical 
oligarchies, with political confederacies 
with Satan — a series of victories embodying 
the great progresses of civilization. 

So, too, he returned from his contest with 
the philosophic materialism of the eight- 
eenth century ; and the scientific material- 
ism, so called, of the nineteenth century 
shows signs that it will only encounter the 
fate of its fallen predecessor. In like man- 
ner, its own speculative positions, though 
bold and brilliant, are being weakened at 
all the chief points of controversy and must 
eventually surrender at discretion ; for, in 
the nineteenth century, the facts of matter 
have as surely failed to come to the support 
of materialism, under the name of science, 

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as, in the eighteenth century, the laws of 
logic and metaphysics and moral reasoning 
refused to come to the rescue of material- 
ism, under the name of philosophy. That, 
too, was a great movement in its day, but, 
like the wicked, it passed away, and lo, it 
was not. 

To an intelligent Christian who has kept 
pace with the great controversy of recent 
years, in all its various lines of argument 
and evidence, the Christian outlook is con- 
tinually brightening. The opposers having 
failed to turn a single fundamental Chris- 
tian position, the era of suspicion and sus- 
pense must logically pass away. Individual 
skepticisms there will always be ; but the 
position of the whole question at this time 
is wonderfully reassuring. I know we have 
some teachers among us who seem to fear 
lest they should be deemed uninformed and 
unscientific, and who are already so nearly 
panic-stricken that they appear ready at the 
first appearance of the enemy to haul down 
the flag, or at least to drop it to half-mast ; 
but that is only because they have only 
half mastered the subject in controversy. 
They surrender to the enemy when they 
should have crippled his resources. Whether 

144 



Zhc Celestial Summons 



their sweeping admissions, made on tlieir 
own authority, proceed from the preacher 
or the religious editor or the theological 
professors address on Commencement Day, 
no one can any longer make such gratuitous 
concessions without impeaching his own 
scholarly intelligence. It is well to realize 
this fact ; and a certain class of Christian 
apologists will soon find it out and have oc- 
casion to make apologies for themselves. 

It was the necessity of Christianity that 
she should encounter stalwart enemies — 
brute-force persecution in one age, sophis- 
tical cawSuistry in another ; in the eighteenth 
century philosophical materialism ; scientific 
materialism, so called, in the nineteenth, 
beyond which we can conceive nothing 
more in the way of purely intellectual en- 
counter. I say it was necessary, for the 
full disclosure of her divine evidences, that 
Christianity should receive these successive 
onslaughts, that she might demonstrate her 
ability to withstand them. 

She is nobly doing so. And, when the 
opposition shall have expended its last 
effort and exhausted the whole measure of 
its resources, Ave may be sure that a di- 
vine Power always present in the world will 

145 



Zbc Celestial Summons 



order a halt all along the line, and that 
Christianity will be found standing on that 
grand vantage ground of complete authen- 
tication which she could never so fully oc- 
cupy till then — in possession of the whole 
field, claiming the kingdoms of the earth 
for her Lord, authenticated to the intelli- 
gence of the whole earth by every crucial 
test which human ingenuity could devise, 
and glorious in the full-orbed splendor of 
nineteenth-century light. 

Christ has always entered farther than 
the most sanguine of his followers into the 
awful privacies of his redemption work. He 
has ever rebuked the littleness of human 
faith, ever looked confidently, through 
darkness and mystery, to the inevitable 
triumph of the divine purposes. Did we 
not find it so in the emergency of our late 
civil war? What a " horror of darkness " 
was in that hour ! Yet Christ was there ; he 
was working, he never ceased working, till 
all lands sang a new song unto the Lord 
and the world was taken up into the arms 
of his Messiahship and lifted forward at 
least two hundred years. But these things 
are past ; why refer to them now? Because 
the lesson may be needed some time ; there 

146 



Zhc Celestial Summons 



may be other sorrowful, even bloody, con- 
tingencies when we shall need a faith 
strengthened for its watch with Christ by 
the recollection of his wonders past. Be- 
cause the hour may be coming when our 
American Christianity, if not our American 
civilization, shall again have to say, "I 
have a baptism to be baptized with; and 
how am I straitened till it be accomplished ! " 

But, whatever the emergency, remember 
that the Master will work and wrestle and 
prevail. He shrinks not from the conflict ; 
but how it will grieve him to the very 
heart to come unto us and find us sleeping. 
And when he shall have lifted us to con- 
summations beyond our utmost hope, con- 
summations that shall make heaven and 
earth resound with his praise, shall we not 
be ashamed when he shall look at us with 
those soul-piercing eyes of his and say, 
"What, could ye not watch with me one 
hour?" 

For the individual, for the Church, for the 
nation, it is safe to watch with Christ, safe 
to trust in him ; not only safe, but sweet 
and blessed. O, the watchers with Christ 
have not such a gloomy station, after all. 
And, were the case otherwise, why should 



147 



Zhc Cetesttai Summons 



you hesitate ? Hath not he gone farther on ? 
He will find for you some more tranquil 
spot in the garden of sorrow and say, 
" Tarry thou here, and watch with me; " 
but into the inner recess he will enter alone. 
You shall indeed drink of his cup, but the 
dregs of its bitterness he will drink for you. 
You shall have your needful cross to bear, 
but the terrible cross of atonement shall be 
all his own. Can you not, will you not, 
make your life a loving, earnest vigil with 
Christ? It is so brief withal — only to trim 
your lamp for a short night watch before 
the splendors of an eternal day. Measured 
by eternity, by his awful agony for us, by 
the magnitude of the interests at stake, by 
the glorious results of his blessed atonement 
and our salvation, our watch with Christ is 
but one little hour. 



148 



VII 

(fl^rtetiamtg a Spiritual iJDarfare 



44 The weapons of our warfare are not carnal," — 2 Cor, x f 4, 



Zhc Celestial Summons 



VII 

Christianity a Spiritual Warfare 

Christianity is a spiritual warfare. The 
absolute spirituality of religion — how late 
and how toilsomely men come to the knowl- 
edge of this truth ! By what a laborious 
route of zigzag advances, how fatigued with 
incessant failures or gropings by the way, 
they reach those serene Christian heights 
where the last errors of religious material- 
ism disappear, and the calm, clear, pervad- 
ing spirituality of religion stretches around 
them, boundless and pure as the heavens of 
God! 

Study the Christian through the succes- 
sive stages of his progress, and see how the 
same one error of religious materialism, or 
materialized religion, clings to him persist- 
ently at every transition. He pays his 
debts, he feeds the hungry, and seems 
almost to feel that this is enough. But this 
is not the divine element in religion — only 
the human. He does not thus serve and 
adore God in a spiritual sense. He rather 

153 



Xtbe Celestial Summons 



serves man by works ; and there is little in 
works that is not " of the earth earthy," 
little that is not essentially materialistic. 

Does he grow ashamed of this and, though 
still earthly as ever, propose for himself a 
more spiritual experience? But how hard 
it is for him to overcome his native ma- 
terialism! He will not believe unless in 
some way he can see and hear and touch. 
Insensible, dead to the spiritual world in its 
highest, deepest, and most glorious realities, 
his vaunted spiritism is only a begging ma- 
terialism still. 

Does he seek to rise to a higher plane 
through an earnest Christian activity? 
Well, if he rebuke not those who are guilty 
of casting out devils, but who follow not 
with him, if he do not waste his energies in 
useless contentions as to which particular 
form of Christianity shall be the greatest 
in the coveted glory, yet he is very long in 
learning the truth that the kingdom he 
would serve so zealously is " not of this 
world." Men will admit in the abstract 
that " an idol is nothing in the world," that 
Judaism is obsolete, that God is a Spirit to 
be worshiped in spirit and in truth ; yet in 
passing upon a thousand matters pertaining 

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to his service and involving the vital char- 
acter of Christianity — that is to say, its real 
province, the means by which it works, the 
results at which it aims and in which it ter- 
minates — in all these respects the divine 
spirituality of this service is still too often 
unappreciated or ignored. 

Yet to the necessities and contingencies 
of the purely spiritual life, I cannot but 
think, the system of Providence has been 
graduated from the beginning. The spirit- 
ual idea has been central in those great 
religious dispensations into which he has 
distributed the history of the world, and 
thence is taken up and centralized in the 
last and most silent operations of his grace 
in maturing the work of individual sanctifi- 
cation. Its propagation has been the labor 
of Providence; its establishment is the com- 
pletion of religion. 

Seems it almost an incongruity to special- 
ize this spirituality in opening my remarks 
on a text that portrays the Christian life 
under the figure of a warfare? No, there 
is no incongruity here. For that warfare 
itself is waged againstthe prevalent material- 
ism and sensualism of our nature, whether 
considered as carnal forces openly defying 

15:3 



Ube Celestial Summons 



the authority of religion, or as the arbitrary 
and factitious quarrel of religion herself 
against the natural and harmless use and 
enjoyment of material things which cannot, 
within due limitations, justly provoke her 
criticism. 

It is time to remember that religion 
can descend to such morbid solicitude about 
trivialities and externals and things indif- 
ferent as to lose herself in them, and thus 
distract the attention of men from that 
in which the kingdom of God really con- 
sists ; or she can exaggerate some outward 
institution of her own, as an episcopacy or 
a baptism, to a position of such false im- 
portance in the Christian system as to dis- 
tort the entire symmetry of that system and 
belittle the spiritual grandeur of its whole 
movement. In either such case she repeats 
the same fault and reproduces the very ele- 
ment she complains of ; for what is all this 
but materialism in a religious form? 

The Hindu devotee, self-tortured on the 
top of his pillar of which he almost becomes 
a part, painfully postured on single foot, 
mid heat and cold and storm, with cruel 
penances, fastings, and scourgingsto mortify 
the flesh, while all the time he can think of 



154 



Zhc Celestial Summons 



nothing else, of course ; and Jesus, eating 
and drinking with publicans and sinners in 
all the stainless purity of the Son of God — 
which of the two, will you say, gives us the 
true type of the spiritual man? 

As this illustration shows, an exagger- 
ated, morbid self-mortification is only an in- 
verted materialism. It seeks through the 
flesh what can be accomplished only through 
the spirit. It is under bondage. It cannot 
know the liberty of the sons of God. " We 
are the circumcision, which worship God 
in the spirit, and rejoice in Christ Jesus, 
and have no confidence in the flesh." You 
do not glorify the spiritual quality in re- 
ligion by mixing it up with every ascetic, 
narrow notion which even good people may 
take into their heads. To defend spiritual 
Christianity in what it is we must first de- 
fend it from what it is not. 

The time was when the struggle of re- 
ligion had the appearance of a material 
struggle to an extent we can little realize 
at present; when in a rude age and an 
idolatrous world the very ground had to be 
prepared, most literally, for the reception 
of the worshipers of Jehovah. Why were 
the gorgeous nations of the earth passed 

155 



Uhc Celestial Summons 



by? Why was not Egypt chosen, rich and 
cultured and famous and influential? Why, 
from among the millions of Egypt, should a 
race of downtrodden and degraded slaves 
be elected to bear the vessels of the Lord 
and to fulfill the mission of the theocracy? 
Behold the panting, palpitating fugitives, 
with the pursuers at their back and the Red 
Sea at their feet. How easy were it for a 
sarcastic observer to exclaim, just then, 
" Ah, glorious theocracy, no doubt a bril- 
liant history is opening before you, spar- 
kling, in the coral depths of the briny sea!" 

Behold them at a later stage; again 
theirs seems a forlorn hope indeed. They 
hold not so much as the ground that is 
necessary for the symbols of their religion 
to be planted upon. It must needs be con- 
quered for them and then held against in- 
vasion, for they are a comparative handful, 
inclosed by the heathen nations in arms. 
How remarkable at such a juncture appears 
the divine prohibition of chariots and horses 
and alliances, the fundamentals of military 
strength! Never could Israel prevail by 
military force ; but never could she be de- 
feated by the want of it. Nay, reducing 
her swelling armies to the merest handful 

156 



Zbc Celestial Summons 



of subalterns and dismissing the rest to 
their homes, her God would make one chase 
a thousand, that so she might unceasingly 
acknowledge, " Some trust in chariots, and 
some in horses : but we will remember the 
name of the Lord our God." " The Lord 
of hosts is with us." 

These glimpses illustrate the whole his- 
tory of Judaism. What did it mean? 
What lesson did God aim to teach his 
people for all ages to come? 

Mark the transition from Judaism to 
Christianity. Who was the Founder of 
Christianity but the " Man of sorrows?" 
Who were its apostles but the simple- 
hearted fishermen? What was its history 
but crucifixion? What was its Church but 
a timorous band that looked out from a 
solitary chamber upon a bloodthirsty Juda- 
ism and the broad world of intolerant pagan- 
ism? And what, meanwhile, was its propa- 
gating pOAver or arm of defense but the 
solitary doctrine of Christ crucified — cer- 
tainly, to all human view, the height of ill- 
timed fanaticism. Paganism had prestige 
and patronage. Paganism had caste and 
antiquity. It had fire and sword, too, if 

necessary. Its fascinating and sensual 
11 

157 



Ube Celestial Summons 



mythology cast a charm over the masses, 
while its subtle and mystical philosophy 
made it a power with the refined. How 
absurd, then, to take the name of Jesus f 
fresh from the charnel-ground of Jerusa- 
lem, make it the center of a new religious 
system that could succeed only by the 
radical subversion of the consolidated 
opinions and usages of ages, and project it 
against this whole array of fashion, patron- 
age, and learning, the social, political, and 
religious order of the world! Yet how 
soon these yielded to the peerless name of 
Christ! No historic gleam that paganism 
could boast but paled before the matchless 
brilliancy of the Malefactor's name; no 
pagan philosophy but recoiled before what 
seemed the most humiliating and unnatural 
of doctrines — Christ and him crucified ! 

And when, in a later age, simple Chris- 
tianity had degenerated into an ecclesias- 
tical establishment where the truth, though 
not dead, lay buried, as in a splendid tomb, 
what was it but the liberated Bible that 
felled to the earth the man of sin at Rome ; 
what was it but the great doctrine of the 
Reformation, justification by faith, charm- 
ing above all the gaudiness of papal cere- 

158 



Ube Celestial Summons 



monial and stronger than all the fulmina- 
tions of papal fury? 4 'The just shall live 
by faith," said the Reformers. " Believe 
on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be 
saved," they said. That was all. But 
nothing could compare with it, nothing 
could approach it. What could the hierarchy 
do? In vain they burned incense upon 
altars venerable with the antiquity of a 
thousand years and burdened with the gold 
and silver of captive empires. In vain were 
the priestly incantations of the mass, the 
pealing symphonies of the choir. In vain 
were priest and cardinal and pope. In vain 
the grand old cathedrals stood, the Vati- 
can thundered, the Inquisition reddened 
and ran with blood. In vain the art and 
pomp and power of the world alternately 
coaxed and cursed, smiled on heretics to- 
day and slew them in hecatombs to-morrow. 
Wiser than all their wisdom, richer than all 
their wealth, mightier than all their thun- 
der, and sweeter than all their music, rose 
the simple word of faith that was able to 
save the world, " Believe on the Lord 
Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved." 

There came another crisis. Spiritual life 
was nearly extinct in Europe. If the 

159 



Zhc Celestial Summons 



familiar descriptions of that general re- 
ligious prostration, and of the great move- 
ment that followed, to many seem to be 
overdrawn, no less an authority than the 
historian Green has painted both in stronger 
colors than would be deemed befitting a 
Methodist pulpit. Openly had the boast 
been made that the Christian religion was 
at last dead ; that nothing further was to be 
awaited but its final burial; that it must 
inevitably disappear in form, as it seemed 
almost to have disappeared in fact. The 
rationalistic mist had veiled the truth from 
Germany. In France infidelity and its at- 
tendant sensuality raged without restraint. 
And even England, satisfied with having 
fought the battle of her evangelical faith, 
had lain down to sleep away her evangel- 
ical life. In America affairs were scarcely 
more hopeful. The Revolution had left 
almost as little place for the English Church 
as for the British throne; its priesthood 
had retired, and its influence was scarcely 
felt as an actual presence in society ; Cal- 
vinism, not modified then as now, w r as 
feebly promulgating a theory of uncondi- 
tional decrees that aimed to exalt the divine 
sovereignty, but depressed the standard of 

160 



abe Celestial Summons 



human responsibility; the presence of for- 
eign troops had sown the seeds of trans- 
atlantic infidelity, and already the field 
showed signs of a terrible harvest ; while 
immigration was extending through the 
West its thousands of scattered families, 
destitute of religious ordinances or in- 
fluences of any kind. Compared with that 
era, in either hemisphere, the present con- 
dition of Christendom might almost be 
called millennial. 

Such was the state of things portrayed by 
impartial history when a few sincere, labori- 
ous, simple-hearted men went forth, under 
the derisive epithet of " Methodists," with- 
out prestige, without patronage, nay, 
mocked, mobbed, and hunted wherever they 
appeared, and equipped with only the sim- 
plest of Christian doctrines applied with all 
their experimental power. But how soon 
it appeared that these old doctrines had lost 
nothing of their divine efficacy; quickening 
the spiritual heart of England, beating 
back the French infidelity with one hand 
and the Germanic with the other, and im- 
planting peace and gladness over the length 
and breadth of our own continent! These 
fervent men penetrated to our destitute 

161 



Zbc Celestial Summons 



frontiers with psalm and prayer and preach- 
ing, carrying in the van of our westward 
march, at every step, the Bible and the 
cross, until that mighty region — thank 
Heaven! — was rescued from the grasp in- 
fernal that was clutching at its moral heart- 
strings, and hill and valley reverberated 
from the Atlantic to the Pacific with the 
hallelujahs of a Christian civilization, a 
Christian land! Rejoice, O heavens; be 
glad, O earth ! Again God's right hand and 
his outstretched arm had gotten him the 
victory. 

Now this law, my brethren, of the su- 
premacy of simple spiritual force, ever 
taking us by surprise, turning strength into 
weakness and weakness into strength, 
wisdom into foolishness and foolishness 
into wisdom, reversing natural order and 
confounding the conclusions of worldly sa- 
gacity — this law extends from the public 
and historic career of religion to the inner 
experience of the individual soul. It is no 
more operative in the vast aggregated mass 
of the whole Christian world than in the still 
recesses of the isolated Christian heart. 
While it must direct the energies, and de- 
termine the methods, and prescribe the 

162 



Zhc Celestial Summons 



aims of the Church at large in its great 
contest with the leagues of sin, it must 
dominate the struggles and regulate the 
growth of each separate Christian character. 
And it is especially significant that the in- 
imitable description of the Christian armor 
which Paul has given in the Epistle to the 
Ephesians should be addressed to the 
Ephesian believers as individuals, and not 
as a collected and organized community. 

You will observe that this description, 
with all its copiousness of amplification, is 
readily reducible to a few primary appli- 
ances of moral warfare, alike defensive and 
aggressive, with which the Christian warrior 
may guard the heritage of his Lord, and then 
hasten forward to the subjection of every 
adverse power to one harmonious spiritual 
kingdom. 

First, truth — that deep, conscientious sin- 
cerity which ever regards the integrity of 
its own motive, preparing the soul, thus, for 
the reception of the divine will, according 
to the promises, ' ' If any man will do his will, 
he shall know of the doctrine ; " ' ' Then shall 
we know, if we follow on to know the Lord." 
Next, faith — an earnest, practical confidence 
in the sufficiency of the divine word, the 

103 



Uhc Celestial Summons 



sword of God's right hand, with a keen edge 
for every error and a ready stroke for every 
foe ; the sword of the Spirit — not, therefore, 
to be wielded apart from him and independ- 
ently of him, but as subordinate to him ; 
the Spirit's sword for the assertion of the 
Spirit's living law, wielded this way or that, 
as helisteth, even as the hero is greater than 
the sword ; in brief, the divine word as in- 
terpreted by the Spirit to a true and honest 
heart. Then, prayer, looking away from 
every inferior resource and making the direct 
appeal to God. Multitudes have proved that 
in pursuance of processes so simple as these 
their alienation from God has ceased, strong- 
holds have yielded, high tow r ers have been 
cast down. Myriads have proved this ; ages 
have set their seal to it. 

And so, with a confidence born of expe- 
rience, men have too much trusted in these 
processes and vaunted these agencies, and 
in proportion as they have begun to glory in 
the means the results have ceased and the 
means become of no effect. The means have 
no intrinsic efficacy. If I trust in the ab- 
stract power of prayer, I might as well pray 
to a stone. If I make my faith the object 
of my faith, I might as well believe in Mo- 

164 



TTbe Celestial Summons 



hammed as in Christ. If I shut tip my con- 
fidence within the lids of the Bible, I might 
as well read the Shasters of the Asiatic as the 
epistles of Paul. The efficacy of the means 
is of God. If we seek it outside of him, it 
makes little difference where we seek it ; one 
direction is about as good as another. They 
are the instruments of his power, but in 
themselves inert as iron. They are the 
mirror of his glory; remove the reflected 
object, and the mirror stands a blank. 

This explains so many things. There 
was not a serpent-bitten, dying Israelite but 
knew, the moment his glazing eyes were 
glaring on the uplifted brazen form he was 
to look upon, " This cannot save me." The 
Syrian leper knew, every time of the seven 
he went down into the Jordan, ' ' This cannot 
save me." The blind man must have felt, 
the instant the clay touched his recoiling eye- 
balls, " This cannot cure me." But, when 
life and power and healing came, they all 
said, ' ' God hath done it." Do you think 
God would give us means of moral salvation 
that would leave us the power to declare any- 
thing less than that? Do you think the 
testimonies of redemption through the Gos- 
pel are to be struck in a lower key than the 

165 



Zfte Celestial Summons 



testimonies of the wilderness and the Jordan, 
that the Power which restores the soul will 
surrender its glory to another ? But " God 
hath done it" shouts every sinner saved by 
grace. And so, as fast as they are saved, 
they will keep on filling the world with the 
music of the joyful song, 1 ' God hath done 
it; " and, blessed be his name, the world is 
becoming filled with such melody. 

One of the great besetting religious blun- 
ders of our time is this — that men will insist 
on coming to God only by means that have 
a supposed intrinsic, inherent tendency to 
bring them to God, that are supposed to have 
an essential power to produce religious re- 
sults, by processes that are supposed to be 
the natural, rational causes of benefits really 
conferred only through them. This is pure 
rationalism, in its most practical form; as 
if men could build up a kind of staging by 
which they could ascend to salvation by their 
own natural moral locomotion. They say, 
" Follow the example of Christ, and you are 
saved, of course." Of course you are — 
but how ? Their saying this is only begging 
the question, simply telling you to begin 
where you will be happy indeed if you end. 
They make out long moral prescriptions and 

166 



Zhc Celestial Summons 



say, " Take this, and your soul shall live, 
for this compound contains every imagina- 
ble ingredient of spiritual life." They ad- 
vise any amount of morality, any amount of 
devotion, any amount of example — anything 
but the Gospel and its salvation. 

A natural causative connection between 
the means and the result — this is what they 
seek, even if they have to invent the neces- 
sary result. Now, right against this I ven- 
ture to say that the evident natural inappli- 
cability of the means of salvation to accom- 
plish salvation by themselves is doubtless 
one reason in the divine plan for their selec- 
tion. Otherwise, would not men be contin- 
ually mistaking the means for the end ? 
Even now they are not altogether prevented 
from making this mistake, so strong is the 
tendency to it. 

The rationalist or the free religionist 
sometimes says, " There is power in prayer ; 
therefore I will pray. It elevates my soul 
by holy associations; it refines my nature." 
And he prays — to his own soul ; and his own 
soul grants him, probably, such answer as 
he gets. Shutting out God, he makes him- 
self both the subject and the object of his 
petitions. He seeks the ground of efficacy 

1G7 



Zbc Celestial Summons 



in himself and in his works. The Romish 
Church makes the efficacy of the sacrament 
to reside in the intention of the priest, but, 
in reparation, proffers the literal body of 
Christ. x\mid the most solemn pomp of 
worship, with a devout awe scarcely to be 
found elsewhere, the papist kneels and says, 
1 1 This priest and this wafer, become the 
literal body of the Lord — how mighty is this 
sacrament! M and goes forth from the most 
stately celebration of the vital doctrine of 
the atonement the forms of religion can 
know — goes forth, too often, as unbenefited, 
unblest, as thoroughly alienated from the 
life of God as before his knees had trembled 
in the celebration of the mass. He makes 
an idol of the means. 

But when you ask us, ' 'What is the 
natural relation or connection, according to 
your system, between the means and the re- 
sult? " we tell you frankly that we do not 
need any such relation. If we knew of any, 
we should hardly dare use it. We say both 
to the rationalist on the one hand and the 
ritualist on the other that our prayer is 
nothing, our faith is nothing, our Bible and 
sacraments are nothing ; they have no effi- 
cacy or power at all of themselves ; they are 

168 



ftbe Celestial Summons 



" mighty through God," and through him 
only. Not that we despise the means. We 
cannot live without bread ; but the living 
bread cometh down from heaven. We can- 
not fight without weapons ; but the sharp- 
ness of the sword and the strength of the 
shield and the glory of the helmet are of God. 

I cannot give you a philosophical reason 
for the existence of any natural connection 
between the means and the results, between 
the weapons and the victory ; but I can give 
you a moral reason why there should be 
none, and moral reasons are the philosophy 
of God. Sin has lost us the divine presence. 
By nature we are " without God in the 
world," in whom, nevertheless, "we live, 
and move, and have our being." And now 
to our darkened faculties, lo, nature erects 
the awful barriers of her inexorable mate- 
rialism, beyond which we catch no vision, 
we hear no voice ; nature asserts, from the 
relentless uniformity of her fixed, despotic 
laws, " I am all, I am being, there is no be- 
yond." The things of sin and sense assert 
themselves to our affections, swayed by the 
common materialism, saying, "We are all 
there is of happiness, there is nothing be- 
yond; eat and drink, for to-morrow ye die." 

169 



TTbe Celestial Summons 



Yet despite all these barriers of matter and 
sense God has called us. Up through them, 
as through a dark mine leading into light, 
he is drawing us with the drawings of a 
Father. The Father seeks his children. 
' ' For we must needs die ; . . . neither doth 
God respect any person : yet doth he devise 
means, that his banished be not expelled 
from him." What means would he devise, 
think you? Means calculated to mislead us 
on our way and divert us to themselves 
and make us stop short of the goal? Never, 
when that goal is a Father's presence, a 
Father's heart. 

We are surrounded by all this materialism 
and assaulted by all this sensualism of 
nature, but we are exile children fighting 
our way home ; and through God we shall 
reach it. We shall see this long battle 
fought out to the very end, and shall rise by 
a spiritual victory to the worship that has 
"no temple" and the "house not made 
with hands," and the city which the glory 
of God doth lighten, for " the Lamb is the 
light thereof." It is time for the Church to 
say in her heart what she says in her creed, 
" I believe in God." 

' ' For the weapons of our warfare are not 

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carnal, but mighty through God to the pull- 
ing down of strongholds." What are these 
weapons? Everything that is of the Spirit — 
the faith that looks up to him, the Scriptures 
in which you search for him, the prayer of 
want you breathe into his ear, the loving 
word you pour into the sinner's heart. " Not 
by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, 
saith the Lord." Brethren, that is power, 
that is might almighty; and nothing less 
will give us victory in this war. God means 
we shall have the Spirit in gracious fullness. 

The war with atheistic or agnostic mate- 
rialism is drawing toward its end, and, you 
may depend upon it, the next battle is to be 
the battle of the Spirit. Many are asking 
what is to be the final outcome of the great 
effort which skepticism is making against 
the religion of the Bible. So far as that 
effort is merely speculative — and it is very 
largely so — it will ultimately dwindle into 
insignificance, for people weary, after a 
while, of unsupported theories and assump- 
tions. So far as that effort appeals to any 
definite test or evidence it is largely an- 
swered from the Christian side already, and 
that answer, we believe, will go on to com- 
pletion. 

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But is God, then, going to give up the 
whole work of vindicating and establishing 
his truth into the care of any intellectual 
agencies or argumentative methods, as 
such? If he were to do so, it would be a 
departure from the whole line of his provi- 
dence hitherto. The history of religion 
will not let me believe it. Light is coming, 
help and victory and salvation are coming, 
but they are coming in a way that disbe- 
lievers little suspect and that some Chris- 
tians too little hope for. Even while I 
speak there are tokens that the dispensation 
of the fullness of the Spirit is hovering 
over the earth. If the American Church 
will only arise now, and truly live to God, 
and let him accomplish his own counsels in 
her and by her, there is not a plague of 
infidelity or intemperance or dishonesty or 
any other plague now in the land but God 
will arise and consume it with the bright- 
ness of his coming. That is how he will 
destroy the evil — with the shining of the sun 
of his righteousness, with a general burst 
and baptism of Gospel glory, purifying and 
beautifying the whole land and resting 
upon all classes of people. 

Have faith in God. Have faith in the 



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kingdom that is not of this world. And 

believe that he holds by their right hand 

the weakest who have learned of him to 

say, "Thine is the kingdom, and the 

power, and the glory, forever. Amen," 
12 

173 



VIII 

$!)e feat pcmMt 



"Well done/'— Matt* xxv, 



Ubc Celestial Summons 



VIII 
The Great Plaudit 

A triumph — how welcome, how delight- 
ful it is ! No matter if it be of little conse- 
quence, we rejoice in it still. No matter 
though the thing achieved be somewhat 
trivial, we have defeated difficulties, we 
have vanquished obstacles, we have tri- 
umphed, and we celebrate our little victory 
with enthusiasm. Every day brings its 
petty difficulties and triumphs, interspersed 
occasionally with those that are greater. 
And even these little conquests over com- 
monplace trials and perplexities are enough 
to fill us with very complacent emotions — 
indeed, with heartfelt satisfaction. 

But here in the text is indicated what 
may be termed a life-triumph. I call it 
so because it implies the accomplishment of 
the great ends for which life was instituted, 
the realization of the highest destinies in 
human possibility; for our text expresses 
the plaudit of Almighty God, approving 
the man who, in the moral stewardship of 
life, has conquered, has succeeded. 

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As we learn from the chapter before lis, 
and from the whole system of the Scrip- 
tures, the present life is a probation for the 
blessedness of another. It is a stewardship, 
in which each person is intrusted by his 
divine Lord with certain talents or endow- 
ments, to be cultivated, invested, and ap- 
plied according to the divine will; as the 
final result of which, after due examination, 
the diligent steward receives the plaudit, 
" Well done, good and faithful servant/* 
and is exalted to the joy of his Lord, while 
the slothful and unprofitable servant is cast 
into outer darkness, weeping and gnashing 
his teeth. Such is the view we derive 
from the Scriptures of human life, its plan 
of discipline, its results. And it is a view 
which is essential to the whole system of 
the Scriptures, the center of all their teach- 
ing. 

Probation is trial. It presupposes, there- 
fore, the existence of opposing possibili- 
ties, without allowing by this that it in- 
volves any incitement to sin or any necessity 
that the soul should sin. It is a trial 
appointed in order that the soul, by the 
voluntary exercise of its own powers, may 
rise to a higher moral character and per- 

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fection than could be originally impressed 
upon it by creative power. As the soul, by 
the voluntary and proper exercise of these 
natural and, relatively, perfect powers is 
disciplined and rises to higher and higher 
planes of goodness, so, by perverting these 
faculties, it sinks to a lower plane, and thus 
ultimately into sin, like our first parents; 
and this is as far as the human mind has 
ever reached, or probably ever will reach in 
this world, toward solving the vexed ques- 
tion of the origin of sin. 

Moral probation or trial must, therefore, 
be compounded of opposite elements, and 
must concede the possibility of choosing 
between opposite courses of conduct, to one 
or the other of which the soul inclines, as- 
cending or descending at each step toward 
the final maturity of its character, according 
as it allows the higher faculties to dominate 
the lower or the lower to dominate the 
higher, and so reaching on to a moral re- 
ward or punishment beyond the trial itself ; 
for otherwise it were no trial at all, no pro- 
bation at all. 

Two requisites are essential to a proba- 
tion : first, it must have a definite object in 
view ; and secondly, it must have a limit in 

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point of time, a termination. An eternal 
probation is an absurdity in terms. 

If we suppose man's probation to be con- 
tinued in a future life we must suppose 
a choice between two courses of conduct 
still possible there ; there must, on the one 
hand, be helps to holiness, and there must, 
on the other hand, be liabilities to sin; 
there must be opportunity, as now, for at- 
taining the former, and there must be op- 
portunities for gratification, as now, in pur- 
suing the latter ; the one course must afford 
room for the exercise of the moral and 
spiritual faculties, the other must afford 
both room and means for the exercise of 
the natural passions and appetencies, in 
order that there may be opportunity for 
self-discipline, in order that there may be 
such a trial as the soul needs for the highest 
development of its own powers, and such 
as it is actually subjected to in the present 
life. 

If the present life, however, with all its 
encouragements to righteousness and dis- 
suasions from sin, does not avail, what as- 
surance have w T e that a second probation 
would be availing, since, as we have seen, 
it would be a probation still, with all the 

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essential conditions of the present proba- 
tion merely perpetuated? But who knows 
that the future, the invisible, the eternal 
world is so modeled after the present 
world as to serve as the scene of immediate 
and direct conflict between contending in- 
fluences? Who can tell us how these in- 
fluences operate there, how they come into 
collision ? Does virtue struggle there ? Is 
piety beset by difficulty still? Is its success 
never certain? 

But, supposing a continued probation, it 
might be reasonably inferred that the soul 
found incorrigible in the present life would 
remain equally so in the next. Or are we 
to understand that the influences increase 
on the side of piety, and diminish on the 
opposite side? But why, then, the severer 
discipline of the present life? Why the 
sterner process required for our purifica- 
tion here? Why not give over all thought 
of acquiring a spiritual character here, tear 
down our churches, ridicule religious in- 
struction, cast off restraint, and wait till we 
reach some future state where the altered 
conditions of probation shall leave the at- 
tainment of holiness an easy and indifferent 
achievement, and where those who have 



! 



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Ube Celestial Summons 



attained it by heroic struggle lip the steep 
heights of self-denial shall meet the pitying 
smile of their more fortunate neighbors who 
have reached the same happy summit with 
equal certainty and with so little trouble? 

I would like to inquire in what state or 
condition the soul will be during its fu- 
ture trial for purification, where it w T ill 
be neither saved nor lost and, consequently, 
neither in heaven nor in hell? Where will 
it be, then — in some Roman Catholic or 
Protestant purgatory? What I submit is 
that no advocate of a future probation 
should ever flaunt in the face of a good 
Roman Catholic the absurdity of his Ro- 
manistic purgatorial dogma. 

But if the second trial, with its increased 
lenity, should fail to answer the purpose 
there may be a third— since every proba- 
tion must have an end— a third, more le- 
nient still. And if the third should be 
equally unsuccessful we may be accommo- 
dated with a fourth, or with forty, or forty 
thousand. The idea is very progressive, 
for these theorists, having eternity on their 
hands, are never at loss for want of time. 
And so probation may follow probation 
till all get safely established in the life of 

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righteousness without a single stroke of 
self-denial, and are victoriously crowned in 
heaven — victors over nothing at all. What 
a heaven it would be at last ! And what 
an admirable system, indeed, for persuad- 
ing mankind to resist the allurements of 
sin and deny themselves in this present life 
of temptation ! What myriads of converts 
to a pure and spiritual religion a man might 
make, I imagine, going through the land — 
as, God forgive them ! men dare and do go 
through the land — proclaiming to every 
man he meets, whether in a sanctuary or a 
den of thieves, that another probation holds 
out this hope ! Put away the miserable de- 
lusion. Revelation pronounces it false, and 
reason accuses it of folly. 

The truth is, the moment you let go of 
the principle that the issues of salvation are 
limited to the present life you sacrifice the 
truth which gives supreme value and dig- 
nity and moment to life ; you tear the very 
heart out of the Bible ; you make its prom- 
ises and threatenings, its rewards and pun- 
ishments, frivolous, if not meaningless ; you 
take from struggling virtue its staff of 
strength, and from vice the rod of its terror, 
and all that is religiously good and pure and 

183 



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sacred in society trembles on its weakened 
foundations. I lift my voice with these 
heavenly pages, and warn you against the 
delusion. I warn you by their authority 
that if you reject the offer the present life 
affords of becoming reconciled to God you 
lose your only opportunity ; for "behold, 
now is the accepted time; behold, now is 
the day of salvation." Awake, arise! for 
there is work on your hands, and "the 
night cometh, when no man can work." 

Life is a state of trial and of danger. 
We know not what its issues shall be. 
Every person, unless confirmed in the most 
dangerous error, walks the earth under the 
habitual impression that his ultimate des- 
tiny as a moral being is problematical. If 
an irreligious man, whatever he may be- 
lieve, he cannot escape from this suspense. 
If a Christian, working out his salvation 
with fear and trembling amid the hostile 
influences of the world, he feels the same 
uncertainty. The witness of the Spirit 
simply testifies his acceptance to-day, not 
for to-morrow. He may believe in the final 
perseverance of the saints; but this does 
not assure him of his own salvation, for in 
the hour of temptation he is more inclined 

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to doubt his own conversion than presump- 
tuously to assume that he will be inevitably- 
saved. The common objection which Metho- 
dism used to allege against the doctrine of 
perseverance was certainly a mistaken one. 
The tendency of the doctrine, instead of 
being to presumption and over self-confi- 
dence, is to excessive doubt ; its ordinary 
experience is a liability to despondency. 

Trial and danger, then, are characteris- 
tics of human life. But if life be devoted 
to religious watchfulness and constant sac- 
rifice, conquest is certain. Thus the Chris- 
tian discharges his stewardship, dispirited, 
it may be, by much within, by more with- 
out, tempted, buffeted, dying unto sin daily, 
but happily not looking upon this world as 
the land of his rest. He desires " a better 
country." Its rest and happiness, he knows, 
will abundantly repay his present labor and 
tribulation. And still, through all the weak- 
ness and vicissitudes of his spiritual progress, 
you may hear him reverently singing, 

" When thou, my righteous Judge, shalt come 
To take thy ransomed people home, 

Shall I among them stand? 
Shall such a worthless worm as I, 
Who sometimes am afraid to die, 

Be found at thy right hand ? " 

185 



XTbe Celestial Summons 



Yes, the wisdom of the Christian's choice 
will be indicated at length, and the faithful- 
ness of his career will be rewarded, by just 
two words — "Well done!" Yes, it comes 
at last. He is summoned to give an ac- 
count of his stewardship. We may not 
linger on the solemn circumstances of that 
interview, but we know how it will end. 
It will be summarized in just two words— 
"Well done!" 

And what will this approbation import? 
It will mean that he has achieved the mis- 
sion of life. He has been faithful to its 
responsibilities, he has vanquished its temp- 
tations, he has triumphed over its perils, he 
has accomplished its ends. He has been 
successful not merely in some single leading 
enterprise of life, but in the whole life. 
His is a life-triumph that crowns his whole 
existence, past, present, and to come, with 
a signal and universal victory. 

Ah, he stood on dangerous ground. 
There were foes against him. There were 
dangers around him. Angels, looking down 
in suspense from the realms of the invisible, 
could not foretell the result. And now sus- 
pense is at an end. He has triumphed over 
all. He says not merely, ' ' I have won this 

186 



ZTbe Celestial Summons 



field," " I have laid that empire under trib- 
ute," " I have conquered such a continent," 
but he cries with pardonable exultation, 
' ' This is the victory that overcometh the 
world, even our faith." And God answers 
with his approval, " Well done !" 

When shall the Christian receive this 
plaudit? When he shall most keenly feel 
the need of it; when mortal life is past, 
when the rush of worldly excitement is 
over, when the hush, the pause, of eternity 
is come. Yes, when the praises of worldly 
fame have grown silent upon his ear, when 
all earthly pomp has crumbled and is for- 
gotten, he will hear the approving voice ot 
his Lord, and will wear ' ' the crown that 
fadeth not away." Monarchs would give 
their empires, if they had them now, and 
heroes their laurels, and philosophers their 
fame, and statesmen their glory, to stand 
where he stands — in the smile of his Lord, 
approved in the moral stewardship of life, 
victor through all eternity. 

" Lift up your heads, O ye gates; and be 
ye lifted up, ye everlasting doors." But it is 
not your Lord that stands before you, veiled 
in flesh, to reenter his own realm in his own 
eternal right. It is not some heavenward 

187 



£be Celestial Summons 



angel that comes home from some loving 
mission to your glittering portal and claims 
entrance by virtue of his own immaculate 
purity. No, it is a man that stands before 
you — a man who, in fear and weakness, 
fettered with flesh and blood, from yonder 
world of mysteries and sorrows and tempta- 
tions, where hell charged upon his soul in 
its hours of darkness, has come as a kindred 
spirit to claim fellowship and find a home 
in "the palace of angels and of God." 
Have ye a place for humanity? Hear the 
answer in the words " Well done! " and in 
the greetings of the sons of God ! " Lift up 
your heads, O ye gates, and be ye lifted up, 
ye everlasting doors/' and let this redeemed 
heir of glory in. 

11 Well done" — blessed, blessed words! 
—what triumph dwells in the sound ! They 
tell us of death overcome ; they tell us of 
dangers past ; they tell us of sufferings that 
never can return ; they tell us of the divine 
approval; they tell of happiness secure; 
they tell of a great company who stand be- 
fore the throne of God waving high victo- 
rious palms and singing, " Hallelujah! we 
have overcome by the blood of the Lamb 
and the word of our testimony." 

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Zbc Celestial Summons 

My Christian brother, will you stand in 
that victorious company? " He that en- 
dureth to the end shall be saved. ,, You 
have conquered some temptations, you have 
won some victories. Will you be faithful 
unto death, and wear the crown of life, and 
sing at last, " I have overcome? 99 

And you, votary of the world and of sin, 

will you stand in that conquering host? 

Does your way look as if it is leading you 

there? Are you learning that song? Do 

you hear that " Well done," like a voice of 

peace from heaven, in the recesses of the 

morning motive and the evening memory? 

When the day is past and gone, do you hear 

it? When the old year is past and gone, 

do you hear it? When the years of life 

shall all be past and .gone, will you hear it? 

What can life bring you at last worth the 

having, unless it bring you a triumph like 

this? What will it profit you to travel the 

brightest road of worldly ambition up to 

the bar of God, only to hear it said at your 

coming, " Thou slothful, thou unprofitable 

servant ?" What if the world should cast 

out your name and revile you, were you to 

become a Christian ? Do you not know that 

there is a reckoning day coming, when God's 

13 

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XTbe Celestial Summons 



monosyllables will be mightier than the 
thunders of all time, and the godless ver- 
dicts of history will be reversed in the 
twinkling of an eye? At present you are 
concerned for the world's applause ; in some 
coming hour, how your heart will ache with 
the longing to hear the approval of God ! 

I have thought that when it comes my 
time to die I would like to hear again sweet 
voices I have loved to hear. I would like, 
when these eyes grow dim amid the mortal 
shadows, to see around me certain faces I 
have loved to see. But most of all do I 
desire, when speech and hearing and vision 
fail as life's solemn trust falls from my 
palsied hand, that my soul may see the 
form of my loving Saviour bending over me 
and hear him whisper, "Well done." The 
music of that word shall be the keynote of 
our song in heaven, as, with the great com- 
pany of the redeemed, we stand before the 
throne and lift our glad voices in hallelujahs 
to the Lamb. 



190 



IX 



Ct)ri0f0 0ot>ereignt}) ©oer tl)c 



44 Come, see a man, which told me all things that ever I did 
is not this the Christ ? "—John iv, 2% 



Ube Celestial Summons 



IX 

Christ's Sovereignty over the Human Heart 

So far as the memorable conversation at 
the Well of Sychar is recorded, the things 
which Christ had told the woman of Sa- 
maria in relation to her personal history, 
however startling, were few — too few to 
furnish ground for such a sweeping descrip- 
tion; and it has, therefore, been supposed 
that the conversation is but partially re- 
corded. I doubt the need of the supposition 
for the purpose for which it is offered. Her 
words might have been no less emphatic 
under the sudden quickenings of memory 
and conscience, as they were aroused by the 
religious truths that Jesus announced, super- 
added to his evident cognizance of her heart. 

But, whether it was by the personal or the 
doctrinal disclosures addressed to her, or, as 
more likely, by the union of both, that the 
effect was produced on her mind, that effect 
is clear. The result of all was an impres- 
sion of herself as being brought into judg- 
ment ; confronted by an agency at whose 

193 



Ubc Celestial Summons 



presence time and distance and all the bar- 
riers to knowledge rolled away like smoke- 
wreaths before a whirlwind ;by one possess- 
ing an unearthly cognizance of her heart 
and history, and from that hour accepted in 
his proper character ; for it was the affirma- 
tion of faith, rather than the question of 
doubt, with which she closed her appeal to 
her countrymen, " Come, see a man, which 
told me all things that ever I did : is not 
this the Christ? " So did she become, as 
she has been styled, the first Christian apos- 
tle of Samaria — a memorable instance of 
Christ's Messiahship over the human heart. 

As it is to this sovereignty I wish to direct 
your attention, let us begin with this famil- 
iar form of it — that Christ, by his Gospel, is 
a powerful discoverer of the wickedness of 
the heart. His execution of this office is 
astonishing in view of the formidable diffi- 
culties to be encountered. Every member 
of the confederacy of sin recoils from every 
charge of infraction of the divine law — at 
least, of any such infraction as would leave 
the heart depraved and helpless before God. 
For men will claim they have kept his law 
in general, when repeated violations testify 
against them, and unnumbered transgres- 

194 



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sions are held to be only exceptional devia- 
tions from the general course of an upright 
life. The publican in the temple smiting 
his breast and praying with uplifted eyes, 
14 God be merciful to me a sinner/' and 
Simon Peter by Lake Gennesaret confess- 
ing, "I am a sinful man, O Lord" — both 
are characteristic of the conscience aroused 
by a sense of guilt and condemnation — the 
very opposite of what is called, very prop- 
erly, the natural man, secure in his own 
righteousness or regardless of all righteous- 
ness. 

Now, what is the secret of this natural 
resistance to the influences of righteousness ? 
It is the consciousness of wrong which, in 
a measure, the Gospel has already pro- 
duced. It is so in a degree even when men 
are most unawakened and self-secure in 
their unrighteousness. True, many will 
not come to the light, lest their deeds should 
be reproved; yet 44 whatsoever doth make 
manifest is light," and the Gospel, even in 
its fainter manifestations, in its comparative 
distance — while they fly from its light — does 
convince them that their works are not 
wrought in God and that their character is 
not conformed to his righteousness. 

195 



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Thus, while the mind may plead not 
guilty, and with some show of sincerity, 
too — the sincerity of voluntary prejudice 
and error — yet there is, at the same time, a 
manifestation to the conscience, a deeper 
action of the heart, not intense or violent, 
but a sullen admission of the truth in re- 
cesses almost beyond its self -inspection. 
There is often such a double or conflicting 
action in the heart, such a contradiction in- 
wardly between what is ephemeral or super- 
ficial and what is real and deep and abiding 
in our nature. And in such a heart God 
never fails to lodge that testimony that 
leaves all men convinced, though a thousand 
opposing tendencies may dispute its entrance 
and deaden the spiritual hearing. And if 
the unrighteous man seem to retain his com- 
placency under every divine protest, retain 
it even in the hour of death, then it is the 
resistless shock of a coming judgment that 
must upheave the lighter and shallower lay- 
ers of his self-righteousness and leave the 
profoundest strata of his moral conscious- 
ness exposed, all written over with the law 
of God and marred with the abrasions of 
sin. 

We are in the habit of calling the body 

196 



TLhe Celestial Summons 

the outward, and the soul the inward, man. 
But the soul has a similar distinction in 
itself. How true it is that, while the out- 
ward man, the one that seems and appears 
to talk and wrangle, is often left in igno- 
rance and self-deception, Christ does find 
and converse with the deeper man of the 
soul and tell him all things that ever he 
did! 

Why is it that persons who strive so hard 
to maintain a character of general rectitude 
and, as they imagine, of obedience to God 
are never found even approximating true 
religious happiness or satisfaction ? Why 
is it that all their attempts at righteousness 
kindle no flame of joy, or even of emotion, 
through some occasional appropriation of the 
glorious promises of immortality ? Is it not 
because Christ has met them outside the city 
of their self-righteousness and held discourse 
with the deepest heart, discourse which they 
cannot forget and of which they retain a 
silent and gloomy impression ? ' ' Ye wor- 
ship ye know not what" is the truth that 
confounds them ; and every approach to re- 
ligious confidence and the blessedness of 
hope is checked by those deep discoveries 
he has made to them of themselves. 



197 



Uhc Celestial Summons 



But we know there are multitudes to whom 
these discoveries are more fully made, mul- 
titudes from whom the Gospel tears awa3^, as 
with an almighty hand, the last and least 
pretense of righteousness or of apology for 
sin. I have said that the secret of this re- 
sistance to right is the consciousness of 
wrong which the Gospel instantly produces ; 
and it is equally true in certain conditions 
that the more this resistance accumulates the 
more this consciousness is intensified. By 
this very opposition the Gospel discovers to 
the soul its own exceeding enmity. For 
that is an experience true to the very letter 
which Paul puts into the mouth of a sinful 
man complacently pursuing the way of wrong 
until suddenly overtaken by the law of God : 
" I had not known sin, but by the law. . . . 
For without the law sin was dead. For I 
was alive without the law once : but when 
the commandment came, sin revived, and I 
died. . . . Wherefore the law is holy, and 
the commandment holy, and just, and good/' 
It is the man himself who is at fault. 

The sinful passions which we should nat- 
urally suppose would repel the Gospel at 
once and leave it an object of indifference 
cannot actually do so. They are immedi- 

198 



Ube Celestial Summons 



ately interested in it — profoundly interested. 
Why ? The answer reveals a singular fea- 
ture of the Gospel influence. Why are they 
interested, even to antagonism, instead of 
remaining simply indifferent to it ? Because 
the laws of the Gospel to which they find 
themselves opposed are such as evidently 
ought to control them ; because they have 
their foundation in nature, though withstood 
by nature; because they are made by the 
same power that made man; because they 
carry an evident reasonableness, purity, and 
authority that leave the opposer confounded 
by his own opposition. 

How many well-authenticated cases of 
combined interest and opposition are on 
record ! A man pursues a life of quiet infi- 
delity, is a disbeliever in all religion, though 
a very indifferent disbeliever, until his wife 
becomes a Christian. He never regarded 
religious matters before ; but now when she 
prays he blasphemes. While she loves and 
forgives he raves. The more she serves 
God the more the demon in him is aroused. 
He is wrought upon by fury, threatens her 
life if she attends a certain meeting, is fully 
resolved to take her life — for she has gone. 
His eyes flash, his face is distorted, he paces 

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the room in a frenzy of passion ; hesitates, 
irresolutely ; his face is deathly white, the 
beaded drops start from his brow, he stands 
and trembles as in the grasp of a giant. 
What is this ? Some unearthly power is 
telling him all things that ever he did ; the 
great deep of his life's iniquity is broken up 
before him at last. Down upon his knees 
now — " God be merciful to me, a sinner " — 
and his wife's return finds him happily con- 
verted to God and the lion becomes a veri- 
table lamb. Blessed be God who has con- 
verted a multitude of atheists in this very 
way, who breaketh the bow and spear in 
sunder, and turneth the weapons of the ad- 
versaries against themselves, bringing forth 
from the deepest trials of the Gospel the 
highest triumphs of its power ! 

A chief element of this heart-discovering 
power of the Gospel is its wonderful power 
of suggestion. Each precept suggests an 
underlying principle, and the principle is 
boundless in its operation. The cup of cold 
water means charity, and charity is pure love 
to God and man. Each doctrine conducts 
you into the presence of unchangeable truth. 
Each precept or doctrine or duty or grace of 
religion refers you to the spirit of religion, 

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TObe Celestial Summons 

and this is nothing less than universal holi- 
ness. God speaks in all, eternity is at stake 
in all, and whenever the least of them con- 
vinces you of sin you are God's prisoner, ar- 
rested by his own representative. 

If the Gospel says, "Whatsoever ye do, 
do all to the glory of God," every hidden 
motive of your heart is laid bare. If it pre- 
scribes its Golden Rule, a thousand dark 
infractions of its morality burst into view in 
its golden light. When it whispers, * 1 Give 
an account of thy ste wardship/ ' all life's 
wasted years look back upon you. Does it 
say, as to the woman of Samaria, " God is 
a spirit," what mixture of worldliness with 
devotion, what heartlessness and formalism 
and vanity, stand impeached before the sin- 
cerity and simplicity of the Gospel ! 

Take any of these Scriptures — or take 
such Scriptures as these : * 1 Give me thine 
heart; " " Ye will not come to me, that ye 
might have life " Ye are not your own " 
— I say, take any of these, and it instantly 
impresses you. But dwell on it, linger be- 
fore it. What is its effect now? It pres- 
ently begins to show a suggestive, recalling 
power you can hardly arrest or retard. It 
carries a sense of conviction far beyond the 

aoi 



Zhc Celestial Summons 



starting point to ground you never supposed 
that it had access to. It is a signal which 
summons accusing memories, that sweep 
backward into the past, and dart into the 
recesses of the heart, and drag its deepest 
secrets into light. A slumbering, but risen 
and avenging conscience hurries to and 
fro through the length and breadth of your 
life's domain, citing its motives, its responsi- 
bilities, its possibilities and achievements 
and neglects, and massing them against 
you as witnesses to every charge. You 
suddenly find that the law you thought so 
narrow is exceeding broad ; there is noth- 
ing hid from the light thereof. It has your 
whole heart, your w T hole history, in its 
power. It tells you all things that ever 
you did, and all the things you have failed 
to do, searches out the controlling motives 
of your whole life, and reveals the secret 
springs of character. 

And in thus exposing the sinfulness of 
the human heart, the Gospel likewise ex- 
poses its fears and its apprehensions. No 
sinful human heart exists without such fears 
and apprehensions. Indeed, the principle 
of fear was divinely implanted in our nature 
with this practical end in view — that through 

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it we might be led to shun all physical harm 
and moral wrong-doing, which tend only to 
pain and sorrow and unavailing remorse. 
There are times when, even in the strongest 
nature, it does almost seem to drop this 
benevolent character, and to tyrannize and 
torture and rack the mind with imaginary, 
but unspeakable, horrors. Yet even then 
you cannot always control its presentiments, 
its forebodings, its nameless forecastings of 
dreadful fate and impending calamity, its 
dim and shadowy impressions flitting darkly 
through scenes of gayety, like birds of evil 
omen through a sunny sky. But when the 
mysterious elements thunder and flash from 
the rolling blackness over your head you 
attribute your emotion, not so much to 
questions of bodily safety, as to the terrify- 
ing manifestation of mighty forces uncon- 
trollable by human will, and to the awful- 
ness of future destiny, and, if unsaved, to 
an irrepressible sense of sin and guilt. 

Somewhere in the nature of things there 
must be a foundation for all this ; and you 
reach it when you strike the moral domain. 
When that intense consciousness of sin we 
have been noticing develops itself in a man 
no bravado on earth can make him believe 



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that his fear is a groundless farce. To him 
it has a meaning; it has an object. It is a 
monition from an infinite Power arrayed 
against all unrighteousness and ungodliness 
of men. 

There is a "mist of darkness " inwrap- 
ping that ultimate question which is above 
all other questions. There is in the con- 
science of guilt "a certain fearful looking 
for of judgment and fiery indignation." 
This is not theory, but history — the history 
of millions of men, in all the strength of 
their rational faculties and in all the preju- 
dice of sin. Men who would hardly shrink 
from any other encounter on earth recoil 
from encountering the Gospel. I doubt if 
any of the kings and heroes of all time ever 
made so many human hearts quake with 
fear as have actually trembled at the simple 
name of Jesus. But he has told them in 
a moment all things that ever they did. 
They have been overwhelmed with the dis- 
closure, though made to no one under 
heaven but themselves, which shows it was 
at him they trembled. Why is the human 
soul thus overwhelmed? Because in the 
Gospel of Jesus Christ it hears his voice and 
pleads guilty to his accusation. 

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And the benevolent object of all this 
varied working is expressed in that holiest 
beatitude, " Blessed are the pure in heart: 
for they shall see God." Where the soul 
turns to him through his Son it finds, 
strangely enough, that its need of pardon, 
of cleansing, of fellowship, of a Saviour, a 
Comforter — all is anticipated ; a divine fore- 
sight has provided for all these necessities 
of the heart's new spiritual experience be- 
fore the heart could feel them. 

We find another instance of the sover- 
eignty of the Gospel in its power to discover 
the hopes of the human heart. I know 
that so far as they have a purely spiritual 
character or object they may be considered 
its creation, rather than its discovery ; but 
it is true, nevertheless, that, however un- 
directed or misdirected, however unspiritual 
and unpractical, still these longings for a 
good not possessed, these imaginings of 
bliss, these outgoings after some sweet, 
satisfying, but far-off happiness are the 
instincts of universal humanity. Through- 
out the pagan world these hopes either 
bruise their wings against the barriers of 
that dark, impenetrable fate which seems 
to wrap it round and sink down in despair, 



Ube Celestial Summons 



or terminate in a vague anticipation of a 
sensual immortality. Among the irreli- 
gious people of Christian lands they wing 
a varied flight, now fluttering among the 
toys of sense and passion, now sweeping up 
into the glimmer of a poetic idealism ; 
sometimes turning a doubtful wing toward 
a truer sky, but quickly faltering and fall- 
ing under the weight of their own earthli- 
ness. 

Why is it that hopes so sweet are still so 
sad, that faces which seem naturally the 
impersonations of hope are almost insepa- 
rable from the tearful eye ? Why is it that 
man in his freest attribute cannot be free, 
cannot be himself ; that the freest of all his 
faculties, the hope that " springs eternal in 
the human breast," must spring at the call 
of phantoms that reward with tears, till the 
brightest wing of hope casts a shadow of 
despair? 

Let a man repent and believe the Gospel, 
and he will know the answer. He will 
learn then that there has existed a moral 
barrier all the while to the exuberance and 
blessedness of hope— something in the way 
between him and the glorious good for 
which he was created. In those wonderful 



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fruitions which the Gospel either concedes 
to the heart here, or reveals to its faith in 
the hereafter, the converted man sometimes 
starts with surprise to recognize the earliest 
and fondest longings of his soul, now at 
last embodied in real, rational, and holier 
forms, till even the thought of everlasting 
life no longer makes a man abashed, be- 
cause the love of God shed abroad in his 
heart prepares and qualifies him for his 
heavenly citizenship. 

And thenceforth the deepest yearnings, 
the highest imaginings, that the enthusiasm 
of enraptured moments ever knew or ever 
projected into the great unknown of human 
capacity and destiny can never surpass their 
heavenly archetypes, already authenticated 
by a spiritual foretaste. He is exalted by 
these assurances of immortality, these di- 
vine communings, these glory-glimpses — 
not beguiling and disappointing him, like the 
dreams of his former earthliness; not float- 
ing around him, like a mockery, receding 
at his approach and traced only by the 
track of darkness they leave behind ; but 
drawing near and abiding with him in ac- 
tual realizations that thrill him with tri- 
umph to think he is a man, and make him 



Ufee Celestial Summons 



leap for joy to pass the glowing curtain of 
eternity. 

Why did he not appreciate all this before? 
Why did he not understand the longings of 
his own heart? In the deepest and fondest 
experiences of life why did music's spell 
and love's communion and the ecstasy of 
joy suggest no higher possibilities, or only 
suggest visions wherein fancy might revel, 
but reason must not confide? Seasons and 
events that once merely filled his soul with 
musing and longing — when spring came 
with gushes of gladness, and summer waved 
its luxuriant foliage ; when the dawn and 
the sunset kindled their visions of beauty ; 
when the spirit of majesty hovered upon the 
mountains, and the sea, like a troubled 
child, had rocked itself to sleep ; when the 
midnight sky whispered of a far-off calm, 
or the sick bed yielded its troubled dream 
of rest ; when the grave awakened his long- 
ings for unsundered companionship and 
immortal communion — why at such times 
did he not perceive that somewhere were 
realities corresponding to these, that some- 
where were objects of rational hope that 
could arouse the enthusiasm of the heart 
without violating the soberness of the un- 

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derstancling? Why did lie not leap for joy, 
and exult in these significant voices, as the 
living prophets of his soul, when the)'- raised 
their sublime strains under the sanction of 
the Almighty? Because no divine Power 
had interpreted to him the mysteries of his 
heart, had yet explored its depths with the 
light of the Gospel of hope, and explained 
its longings and its needs. He sees the 
difference now, he understands it all at 
last, and adores. 

It is the testimony of history that ' ' the 
heart is deceitful above all things, and des- 
perately wicked : who can know it? " What 
Power is it that knoweth it altogether, that 
turns the heart inside out — this human 
heart, which has been too much for all the 
sages and poets of time; which no philos- 
ophy has been able to explain, and no litera- 
ture has been able to delineate ; and to ap- 
ply a single imperfect key to which, in par- 
tial uncovering of its intricacies, is to earn 
for a man the highest distinction of genius? 
What Power, then, is this that tells a man 
all things that ever he did or thought or 
hoped or feared — not only his actions, but 
himself; not only all that he does, but all 
that he is and is to be, talking to his inmost 

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soul familiarly of his future, as of his past? 
Who is this that reproves and comforts, casts 
down and builds up, kills and makes alive 
again, as one having authority? Tell us, in 
the name of weary, longing humanity, what 
authority is this? Is not this the Christ, 
the Desire of all nations revealed at last, an- 
swering " the universal * come/ " the call 
which all weakness and darkness and sin and 
sorrow combine to pour into the pitying ear 
of the Father of the world? Is not this 
that great Prophet which was to come — 
Teacher, Revealer, Redeemer, Light of life, 
Conqueror of death, Guide to the eternal 
blessedness, the Christ whom heaven and 
earth have anointed, heaven with its truth, 
and earth with her tears, the world's Mes- 
siah and Prince of peace, for whom the 
heart of the world was breaking, and for 
whose coming the generations of time had 
fallen down on their faces and sent the cry 
of their despair up into heaven? 

The cry has been long and bitter, but, 
thank God ! it is answered. We are sure 
of that. Some of us know and can never 
forget how he talked with us by the way ; 
how he laid our hearts bare; told us all 
we were, and all we were doing, in the 

210 



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error of our way. Ah, but we knew what 
we worshiped after that ! We learned what 
that well is from which we drink and thirst 
no more. And now we want to live and die 
proclaiming his Messiahship over the aching 
and longing human heart— that realm where 
he alone is sovereign Lord, and where most 
truly is " the kingdom, and the power, and 
the glory." 

What have the other religions of the world 
done for the common heart-life of the peo- 
ple? They have promulgated doctrines, 
founded institutions, and established cus- 
toms ; but how little has been done for the 
heart's purification or its rest, apart from 
Christ ! How can the intellect dislodge 
him? He has planted an evangelical ele- 
ment in the depths of human sensibilit)' 
that pleads for him with a voice that is 
heard forever over every cavil and clamor of 
the intellect. How can reason ever dethrone 
him? The heart will always exercise its 
own reason, and the intellect perceives this 
at last and comes into line ; and so they 
stand, one undivided humanity, for one un- 
divided Christ. 

I am referring to plain facts, though not 
known as they should be. What was it that 

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first broke that dismal, deathly spell which 
the rationalism of Germany had extended 
over her land, and was rapidly extending 
throughout the Christian world? In the de- 
cline and despondency of evangelical reli- 
gion ; in the gloomy triumph of a Christless 
rationalism; when Christian theology, phi- 
losophy, apologetics, and exegesis had done 
all they could do, and done all in vain ; amid 
the general ferment of the elements — a man 
arose and uttered upon the air the single 
talismanic word ' ' feeling/ ' " Feeling? " 
said Germany, with her brow knit in 
thought ; " yes, that is so. Man has a heart, 
as well as a head, by which to apprehend 
truth and express truth, and henceforth its 
deliverances must be taken into account and 
duly respected in the general argument/ ' 
That word broke the spell. The stroke of 
that single broadsword tore through error, 
beat down her champions, and turned the 
tide of battle. 

This reconciliation of the reason with the 
sentiments will always be marked as the 
dawn of a new era in the modern history of 
Christianity. I fear the Church has not 
learned even the text of this short chapter 
in her own history, much less the important 

212 



Ube Celestial Summons 



lessons it teaches. There is no irrepressible 
conflict between the reason and the senti- 
ments, the intellect and the heart, and we 
must beware of that increasing tendency of 
the modern pulpit, and of the Church gen- 
erally, to regard the intellect as the lawful 
potentate over the working Christian forces, 
and the heart as an imbecile pretender 
hardly to be tolerated. We must not forget 
that one of the most important moral bat- 
tles of modern times has been fought vic- 
toriously for the Church on this issue — the 
right of the heart to be recognized in sum- 
ming up the spiritual forces of human na- 
ture. We must not forget that, when " the 
world by wisdom knew not God," Christ 
interpreted the heart of God to the heart 
of this world ; and in our own times, when 
intellectual self-sufficiency threatened to 
ostracize Christ from the world, the heart 
insisted, went out after him, and bore him 
triumphantly back to his own, 

The Bible comes to the deepest hunger 
of the world with the bread of life from 
heaven ; and a famishing soul knows bread 
from stone. That woman, now filling a New 
England grave, who was found drifting all 
alone on the tossing Atlantic on a spar of the 

213 



Uhc Celestial Summons 



wrecked Ocean Monarch, yet in trustful com- 
munion with her Saviour, and singing in 
plaintive tones, amid the deathlike solitude 
of the seas, 

" Jesus, Lover of my soul, 

Let me to thy bosom fly, 
While the nearer waters roll, 
While the tempest still is high ! " 

represents that one undying hope that keeps 
each of us clinging to the wreck and sing- 
ing over life's stormy ocean. O these deep 
experiences, these great emergencies of the 
heart, when helpless nature, swung out over 
the awful mysteries of life and death, feels 
for the everlasting foundations ! For these 
the Gospel was given with its sweet, strong 
sympathy with the deepest life of humanity, 
with its resources to meet life's urgent 
needs. Christianity has a mission and an 
authentication that will carry it to the ends 
of the world. 

So, proclaim this Messiah over our hearts, 
my brethren ; this Jesus who leans over the 
world's old well and talks with us like a 
brother right from the presence of our 
Father, till we drink in the words of life 
from his lips, and the fever and the thirst 
are slaked by his words within us, springing 

314 



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up into everlasting life. O, tell all men of 
this Messiah ; and, as long as human hearts 
beat amid the darkness and the sorrow of 
this world, they will repel all the assaults of 
infidelity, and human nature will tunnel 
the mountains of unbelief with its very 
heart-throbs after Christ. 

And our hearts are full of the invitation 
of the woman of Samaria, ' 6 Come and see 
him." Is he one to awaken your suspicions, 
or to claim your confidence? Does this 
wonderful and holy character appear like 
one of the happy accidents of history, or is 
he the gift of heaven to your heart and 
mine ? Come and see him. Tell us, ' ' is not 
this the Christ? " And, if this is his char- 
acter, will you not look upon him, will you 
not listen to him and receive him? If so, 
you shall soon say to us, as many said to 
her, " Now we believe, not because of thy 
saying : for we have heard him ourselves, 
and know that this is indeed the Christ, the 
Saviour of the world/ ' 



215 



X 

&t)e <&f)kd anh \\)t 3£sti)cttc in 
<Hl)rt0ttanttn 



44 Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true? whatsoever 
things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever 
things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever 
things are of good report ; if there be any virtue, and if there 
be any praise, think on these things," — Phil, iv, 8* 



Ube Celestial Summons 



X 

The Ethical and the Aesthetic in Christianity 

I think the passage I have read may be 
regarded as one of the most remarkable 
sentences on record. Aside from the Scrip- 
tures we should probably search in vain for 
its parallel in any composition, ancient or 
modern. It urges the cultivation of all 
virtue and goodness to the highest degree 
the mind can conceive, and seems to con- 
tain in itself almost a complete system of 
ethics. To my mind it is especialty inter- 
esting as illustrating the union of the moral 
and the beautiful, the ethical and the aes- 
thetic in Christianity. It enjoins universal 
excellence, which is the highest ideal of 
Christian attainment. 

We could hardly dispense with that word 
"excellence" in considering this subject. 
Coming from a root which signifies to urge, 
impel ; hence, to rise gently, to press above, to 
transcend, no word better expresses the one 
thought in the apostle's mind. He seems 
to be so permeated with divine ideas and 

219 



Ube Celestial Summons 



sensibilities, all seeking and struggling for 
utterance, that, after breaking forth in the 
highest fervors of a joyous salvation, soar- 
ing, glorying, triumphing in Christ, in the 
incomparable ' ' excellency of the knowledge 
of Christ; " after enjoining humility, self- 
denial, moderation, and showing himself as 
practical as he had been impassioned ; after 
enjoining the prayerful surrender of all the 
affairs of life to God, in the assurance that 
so shall the peace of God, which passeth all 
understanding, keep the heart, till we 
wonder what word can be added that would 
not be weakness, or what step could be 
taken that would not be a descent, he cano- 
pies the whole with this remarkable injunc- 
tion, " Finally, brethren, whatsoever things 
are true, whatsoever things are honest, 
whatsoever things are just, whatsoever 
things are pure, whatsoever things are 
lovely, whatsoever things are of good re- 
port ; if there be any virtue, and if there be 
any praise, think on these things." 

How easy to trace here the law of that 
principle of excellence which the apostle in- 
culcates ! How strikingly he delineates the 
method by which it operates— the only 
method by which the highest excellence 

220 



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may be reached. And surely there is no 
other word than "excellence " that will so 
nearly define the motive that has ever ani- 
mated Christianity, that has given humanity 
the upward impetus accelerated through 
the ages, that has inspired and guided all 
the various efforts at reform which society 
has made its ever-advancing march. These 
have found in Christianity their originating 
or effectual impulse ; Christianity has found 
in then; her natural and appropriate out- 
growth ; and there can be no more quarrel 
between them than between the seed and 
the harvest. 

The social and political, as well as the 
moral, progress peculiar to Christianity has 
been cumulative. Historically, she has ex- 
erted her influence in a series of advances 
of which each successive transition has 
been so gradual as to be almost impercepti- 
ble. And men have paused to challenge 
the result and say, " Where is the evidence 
that society is rising and improving through 
the influences of Christianity? We cannot 
see that we have made any progress or stand 
any higher." So a man might pause in the 
ascent of Mount Washington and, looking 

close around him, might say, " After all, I 

15 

221 



TToe Celestial Summons 



see no great elevation ; it seems to be a lit- 
tle lower there and a little higher there; 
but where is the famous Mount Washington, 
with sweeping base and summit in the 
sky?" Sir, it is Mount Washington that 
sustains you while you ask. Look farther. 
Look at yon depths, look at yon heights. 
You have left that level, you are making 
for that summit. You are on Mount Wash- 
ington ! So it is Christianity that bears up 
the unsatisfied and nobly-aspiring progress 
that turns to challenge it. How is it that 
you object to it? Because it has lifted you 
up to the point of objecting. Why do you 
fail to appreciate it? Because its influence 
is all around you and beneath you and above 
you, and you are in the midst of it. You 
are on this mountain of the Lord, and you 
do not realize how lofty and sublime it is. 
But stand down there on the lowlands and 
see how its gigantic form towers majes- 
tically into the vast blue heavens ; or toil 
on to the distant summit, and gaze at the 
world outspread below, and realize in one 
glad, exhilarating moment how far you have 
ascended from the low plain, from which 
you started to climb into a purer and clearer 
atmosphere. 

222 



Zhc Celestial Summons 



The Christian religion cannot be sepa- 
rated from the lofty triumph of Christian 
civilization. The capstone of a temple will 
often glisten in the sunlight while the foun- 
dation is dim with shadows or hidden in the 
earth ; yet there is not a beam that plays 
upon the summit but places there a golden 
crown to honor the obscure and forgotten 
foundation stones. Christianity and true 
progress never can misunderstand one an- 
other. They are one at heart; for excel- 
lence is the aim of the one as of the other. 

And this word " excellence " fitly ex- 
presses the ideal of the Christian soul, which 
forever feels the divine impetus, tries to 
reach out, to rise higher, to lift itself up, to 
transcend its present, to realize its fullest 
capacity for improvement. Excellence is 
the fountain, the life of progress, and the 
Christian soul goes on, rising, towering, ex- 
panding, restless to surpass itself, hasten- 
ing on, aspiring after its source, born of 
God and Godward bound. Religion is the 
living action of God's presence in men, 
breathing forth its divine spirit through all 
the turmoil and darkness of the world. And 
when it would seem that every pure prin- 
ciple, affection, and motive that language 

223 



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can express has been invoked, if this be not 
enough, if there be anything more, any- 
thing omitted in the enumeration, one rule 
of excellence covers all, one universal good- 
ness at which the Gospel aims. " Finally, 
brethren, whatsoever things are true, what- 
soever things are honest, whatsoever things 
are just, whatsoever things are pure, what- 
soever things are lovely, whatsoever things 
are of good report; if there be any virtue, 
and if there be any praise, think on these 
things." 

The text, in the inculcation of this ex- 
cellence, of course excludes all opposites or 
direct sin. Those over whom sin reigns 
are utterly powerless to embody the charac- 
ter here described. Certainly, before this 
spiritual elevation can be attained or fairly 
begun, whatever is directly contrary to 
rectitude must be abandoned. 

The text further prohibits all approxima- 
tion to evil and appearance of it. Conse- 
quently, it proscribes all sophistical casuis- 
try or reservation concerning duty ; all ques- 
tioning how little of goodness may suffice or 
what vicinity to evil may be tolerated ; all 
rudeness, unseemliness, of language or 
manners ; whatever is inconsistent with the 



224 



Ube Celestial Summons 



truest Christian symmetry ; those thousand 
nameless faults and foibles and peccadillos 
we hardly know how otherwise to define 
and certainly should not wish to describe. 

It enjoins that high and persistent cul- 
ture of the soul through which it passes be- 
yond what is merely negative or relative 
and reaches up to a pure and positive ex- 
cellence — and does this of its own volition, 
without the formal intervention and appli- 
cation of any external moral law ; for the 
Christian spirit, though partly the product 
of obedience to Christian rules, yet becomes 
thereby in itself, the body of law being 
caught up into a living soul, the very high- 
est human rule, the most spiritual, the most 
Godlike, of all law — the law of the spirit, as 
much beyond the letter as the letter was su- 
perior to the gross stone upon which it was 
chiseled. 

Yet I believe all this compatible, and the 
whole Gospel compatible, with a happy, 
hearty, human life — not etherealized out of 
the world, not denaturalized into moral 
awkwardness and artificial propriety, but a 
genuine, downright, human life. Chris- 
tianity lifts one up, not coercively, but by 
the continuous ascension of the spirit within 

225 



Uhc Celestial Summons 



him, so that he rises cheerfully and natu- 
rally, as a bird rises, and for the same rea- 
son — it is the law and method of his nature, 
the ascending impulse has been imparted 
to him. 

In a word, the text sets before us as a 
goal the completeness of the Christian char- 
acter, which is the same as to say the com- 
pleteness of manly character, for the terms 
are interchangeable, and the ultimate Chris- 
tianity is the complete development of hu- 
manity, the perfection of each separate 
personal character, the habitual contempla- 
tion of all things pure, worthy, and lovefy, 
that habitual attitude of the soul which re- 
sists every temptation, no matter how allur- 
ing or how plausible, that conflicts with 
its highest possibilities. To this end it 
touches the secret springs of character in 
our thoughts. It proposes a pure, bright, hal- 
lowed thought-life, God's ' ' eternal thought " 
leading our thoughts up into familiar com- 
munion with his own. 

I know some people who have a passion 
for thinking on the dark, disagreeable side 
of everything, and of human character in 
particular. Their minds are instruments 
that apparently have but two strings ; one 

226 



Uhc Celestial Summons 



is depravity, and the other is death. First 
they touch this string, and then that ; but 
when they thrum both together and try to 
produce a chord the effect is altogether 
depressing. If the direction of our thought 
were left to them, their counsel would be 
something like this: "Finally, brethren, 
whatsoever things are false, whatsoever 
things are dishonest, whatsoever things are 
ugly, whatsoever things are abominable ; if 
there be anything paltry or anything ras- 
cally, think on these things. ,, You observe 
how finely the text reverses this arrange- 
ment and seeks to irradiate the common 
chambers of the mind with the consecrating 
light of the highest truth and beauty. 

All this, you perhaps say, is only idealis- 
tic, theoretical, inefficient. But on the con- 
trary a familiarity with the excellent ac- 
complishes some very practical results. It 
tends to embody itself, to express itself, in 
speech, in action ; if in one form, then in 
all forms, for it is itself a unity. It is re- 
flected from every relation, it is exhibited 
at every opportunity in life, until the indi- 
vidual's whole existence is seen to be an 
aspiration after universal virtue. That all 
Christians fully develop this maturity and 

227 



Ube Celestial Summons 



symmetry of Christian stature is not claimed, 
is not true. But this development is pre- 
eminently the Christian's ideal; and the 
purification of our thought-life is the process 
by which this development must be attained. 

And can anyone dare to imagine, so long 
as this text stands in the oracles of Chris- 
tianity, that a saving faith can be divorced 
from purity and holiness, that a man un- 
true, unjust, dishonest, indifferent to the 
temporal welfare of his fellow-creatures 
can atone for all his immoralities in this 
world by a theoretical or outward piety? 
It is not, 4 4 Finally, brethren, whatsoever 
things are faith, prayer, praise, worship; 
if they be intensely devotional, and if they 
be unquestionably evangelical, think on 
these things. " There is a man in the road 
there distressed and dying. He has fallen 
into bad hands. Now, I may come along, 
the best and most zealous of Pharisees, 
meditating profoundly on the law of God 
on my way - to offer sacrifice at the altar. 
But if I leave it to that half-heathen Sa- 
maritan to get down from off his beast and 
pick that man up and cany him into the 
inn and have him cared for and pay the 
expense himself I may depend on it that 

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the Lord Jesus Christ will indorse the Sa- 
maritan's orthodoxy before he will indorse 
mine ; and if I should some time happen 
to hear the Master preaching by the road- 
side or expounding in the temple, and he 
should bring in that incident as an illustra- 
tion in some parable of his, I may be sure 
he would do so in a way to make my Pharisee 
blood tingle in my Pharisee veins and to 
show me how small, pitiable a thing a mere 
temple - going, legality - loving, mint-and- 
anise-tithing Pharisee will be in the king- 
dom of God. 

The Christian does not need to bring 
everything successively and separately to 
the altar before he can be certain whether 
it can have a place in his heart. He has 
consecrated himself there, and whatever is 
in sympathy with that consecration, in 
sympathy with the glory of God or the 
good of man, goes straight to his heart of 
its own accord. Is a thing true? I am for 
it. Is it just? I am for it. Is it beautiful 
and lovely? I am for it. Has it any virtue 
or any praise, is there good in it or coming 
of it, do good men believe in it and speak 
well of it? I am a Christian ; and you may 
count me for it without asking. 

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This is Christian service, and such serv- 
ice is perfect freedom. Says Martin Luther : 
1 ' I am not of the opinion of those who wish 
to overthrow all the arts in the name of the 
Gospel; I only wish that they should be 
used in the service of the One who created 
them for us." 

Whatsoever things are thus, no matter 
where you find them, no matter who pro- 
jected them, what authorship they claim, 
or what name they carry, if they bear the 
impress of the true, the good, the lovely, 
there is divinity about them somewhere. At 
the same time you are not to embrace the 
wrong things that may be associated with 
them, the error or falsehood or mischief 
that may be intermingled with them. You 
are not to blind yourself to all distinctions 
and rush into fellowship with the evil to 
show your fellowship with the good. 
Whatsoever things are, saith the Gospel ; the 
things that are not may require kindness and 
charity, but not fellowship and fraternity. 

Therefore, if the man you call a heretic 
has any intermixture of truth in his creed, 
if you find there any truth, acknowledge 
that truth, adopt it, because it is the truth, 
and whatever is of the truth is honest and 



230 



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of good report. If a personal enemy, with 
all the faults and evils he may possess, yet 
"shows a spark of virtue left shining in his 
isoul, be glad for its shining and confess 
that it does shine ; for virtue is of God 
everywhere. If the world is astir with any 
new idea that is good and wise, or if, with- 
out having stirred the world as }^et, there is 
gathering any movement for reform of vice, 
for amelioration of misery, welcome it, 
cooperate with it; " think on these things," 
give them a warm place in your heart, and 
join heart and hand with them for the 
battle. Put away the evil, inaugurate the 
good. Put away the false, inaugurate the 
true. Every where crown the true and 
bless the beautiful forever. 

How far does a man see into ' ' the mys- 
tery of godliness" who does not see that, 
after all, goodness is the grand law of godli- 
ness in earth and heaven? " Ye that love 
the Lord, hate evil;" that is the distinctive 
sign that you do love him and belong to 
him ; not that you hate this or that evil or 
love this or that virtue, but that you have 
that deep-down, genuine, earnest soul of 
goodness in you which hates the whole sum 
of the evil and loves the whole sum of the 



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good, uniformly, every way, and all the 
way round. Let us pray always as we pray 
in the communion service—that prayer 
which is the sublimest, I have thought, of 
any uninspired prayer, if it be uninspired, 
that a mortal ever offered in the ear of God 
— " Confirm and strengthen us in all good- 
ness/' O, how much there is of God, how 
much there is of Christ, how the whole 
spirit of the Gospel stands glorified in this 
simple cry of the soul to be confirmed in 
goodness! " All goodness?" I do not ask 
a part ; I do not pray for faith or hope or 
charity alone ; but, O God, whatever is of 
thee, whatever is good, whatever is true and 
just and pure and lovely, in mercy make 
haste to perfect these things in me and con- 
firm and strengthen me in all goodness. 
There is something in the good Gospel of 
the good God that tends to kindle involun- 
tarily the ardor of the soul toward every- 
thing that is good. And the truest type of 
a Christian is not a man who has this good 
quality or that good characteristic, but a man 
who has an unconquerable loyalty to every- 
thing that is good, who has a genuine, hearty 
affection for it and spontaneous affinity with 
it, and who is good in this respect and that 

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respect all the way through. If anything is 
evil, he hates it ; if anything is good, he loves 
it. Because Christ is King and has begotten 
him into his kingdom, he clings to Christ 
with all his heart and longs to be "com- 
plete in him." This is his creed ; he stands 
or falls with Christ. 

How wonderfully the ethical and the aes- 
thetic shade into each other in the religion 
of Christianity! We may not say that 
beauty is religion, but we may say that re- 
ligion is duty and beauty. The pure and 
the lovely are scarcely separable elements. 
How practical and utilitarian and govern- 
mental, a restrictive force here, an impelling 
force there, religion needs to be in this 
matter-of-fact world, with all our variety of 
interests and obligations. Yet no angel 
sent into this world bathed with the rose- 
light of an immortal morn, with a brow of 
glistening love and gladness and a voice 
sweeter than the music of the spheres, 
could kindle us to such inspiring dreams of 
unearthly excellence or exalt us to such en- 
thusiasm for all that is pure and beautiful 
and good. This religion will die only when 
all the noble promptings and all the best 
possibilities of humanity die. 

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When experience ceases to find in man a 
dark and evil nature that needs to be con- 
tended with and overcome, and a better 
nature that needs to be replenished and 
quickened and rendered victorious and su- 
preme, when Christianity fails to respond 
to the weaknesses and the longings of hu- 
man consciousness, it will be time to invoke 
something truer, something that accords 
better with the scientific knowledge and 
the needs of man. When a system is found 
that proves a mightier force than Christian- 
ity in the achievement of moral and spiritual 
results, that proves more restrictive to the 
evil, more liberating and crowning to the 
good, it will be time to invoke it for the 
uplifting of humanity. When the march 
of progress leads to the discovery of some 
deeper principle of excellence in the heart 
and mind, something whereby the will be- 
comes more heroic, while the sensibilities 
become more refined, whereby genius takes 
a grander flight and poetry sings a sweeter 
song and the artist-soul frames a fairer 
vision, it will then be soon enough to sacri- 
fice Christianity in the name of assthetic 
taste. But while Christianity continues to 
meet the conditions of philosophic truth, of 

234 



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moral utility, and of spiritual beauty we 
shall not lightly fling it aside. We must 
suspect that this upland so conducive to the 
best culture of the soul, this garden of the 
graces, this home of all the higher humani- 
ties is likewise the altar of God. 

So let everyone take the divinest dream 
of his soul and work out in character and 
action what God has wrought into the high- 
est capacities of his being. And in this 
ever-aspiring activity will his soul find rest. 
For a soul ever true to the pursuit of excel- 
lence will move in an element of light and 
loveliness. It will be fed from immeasur- 
able fountains of joy and beauty ; and such 
souls will remind us of that beautiful track 
in the firmament called the Galaxy or Milky 
Way. Who has not seen that Milky Way 
in the still night and rejoiced? Who has 
not wondered and longed to penetrate its 
sacred mysteries ? But astronomy is assured 
that its appearance is the result of innumer- 
able stars, countless centers, clusters, sys- 
tems of light, separately indiscernible, but 
whose rays go out and meet and mingle and 
blend, incessantly reflected and refracted 
to and fro in every direction, until the 
infinite space is traversed with one glow- 

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ing belt, girdling the heavens for ever- 
more. 

We have sometimes known a Christian, 
whose graces, joined with graces — every one 
of them a heavenly radiation — were mutu- 
ally shining upon and illuminating each 
other, and the light of each was radiant 
with the light of all, until the whole soul 
was aflame with the glory of the Lord. 
And I have longed that the whole Chris- 
tian Church were a Church of such souls, 
that along the ascending way might stretch 
the luminous procession, where light is 
multiplied in light, and all are giving and 
all are receiving, and the radiance of re- 
demption, diffused and blent in one inter- 
mingling, all-enveloping glow, might be- 
come a bridge of living light spanning the 
dark void from earth to heaven, until multi- 
tudes should look up, in the night of time, 
blessing the light of the true, the pure, and 
the lovely, and thinking on " these things." 

236 



XI 

3, Heltgion fox 3.11 &imc 

16 



44 And they gathered it every morning*"— Exod* xvi, 2J, 



Zftc Celestial Summons 



XI 

A Religion for All Time 

What a strange, beautiful spectacle must 
it have been to the children of Israel, 
emerging from their tents in the early 
morning as the night mists were rolling 
away, when they saw the ground overspread 
with the miraculous manna, white and pure 
and fresh as the winter's frost. It must 
have been easy, methinks, for them to offer 
their morning hymn of praise to the Father 
of all good gifts. 

Let us sing praises that the spiritual 
manna falls oftener. The Christian Israel, 
marching through the world, finds it all the 
time falling, forever fresh and new. " Hav- 
ing, therefore, brethren," saith the Scrip- 
tures, "boldness to enter into the holiest by 
the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way, 
which he hath consecrated for us, through 
the veil, that is to say, his flesh. ,, Millions 
have experienced and exclaimed, " What a 
new and living way this is." Yet, in the 
councils of God, the Lamb is " slain from 



Zhc Celestial Summons 



the foundation of the world and this way 
is older far than the Jewish sacrifices. 

The truth is, Christianity is both an old 
and a new way, ancient in its origin and 
authority, yet new in its adaptation to every 
fresh case of human sin and human sorrow 
and human aspiration ; and the world has 
need of both its ancient foundations and 
its freshness as of youth. 

There are persons who complain, and 
would have us believe, that our evangelical 
Christianity is comparatively new, is an in- 
novation, a mere conventionalism — crystal- ■ 
lized, indeed, around certain half historical, 
half mythical centers, appropriating to itself 
the name of Christ and some of the terms 
and phrases of the simple religion which he 
testified among men, but otherwise and sub- 
stantially a strange plant interpolated, a 
morbid growth and a corruption of that 
simple religion. But, with the aid of the 
gospels and epistles of the New Testament 
— the most original and most direct sources 
of information that give access to the words 
and acts of Jesus — and further aided by the 
institutions and the literature of the early 
Christian age, it is easy for us to show that 
the evangelical Christianity of to-day is 

240 



Zhc Celestial Summons 



simply a continuation of the old and origi- 
nal Christianity that Jesus taught. 

At the same time, there are many who 
scoff because, as they insist, it is old, worn- 
out, out of date, and out of place. But we 
are no less ready to claim for it immortal 
youth and perennial freshness that never 
can be exhausted and never can be super- 
seded. It has much that is divinely old, 
and much that is divinely new; and it is 
only when the old and the new are combined 
that religion is seen in the w^hole range of 
its truth and in the mighty grandeur of its 
power. 

Historically, Christianity is ever old ; 
spiritually, it is ever new. It originated in 
an eternity past ; and yet, like the manna, it 
is gathered every morning. In this twofold 
character it rounds itself out to the complete 
circle of human necessity and meets every 
requisition that can reasonably be made on 
a religion. Historically, ever old ; spiritually, 
ever new — this, I think, gives us the true 
conception of Christianity. 

The simple thought evolved from the 
text is, that we are to be manna gatherers 
— that we are to gather, often and in its 
freshness, the grace that nurtures the soul 

841 



Ube Celestial Summons 



by divine communion. Food supposes life ; 
life, food. And true religion is a life, a 
continuous, advancing life ; not an occasional 
upheaving of some great principle stirring 
the soul ; not a faith rising once in a while 
sublime over the standards of sight and 
sense; not self-denial going forth once a 
year all equipped for the battle and radiant 
with impulsive zeal for God. It is the spirit- 
ual heart forever beating. It is the spirit- 
ual vision forever uplifted. And the song 
that cheers its toilsome march is ever, 
" Nearer, my God, to thee." 

What but this growth in grace will pre- 
vent a wearisome and discouraging monot- 
ony in the Christian journey? A man 
taking his accustomed walk every day over 
the same unvarying path is soon satiated 
with the finest prospect. But some morning 
he happens to pass beyond his old habitual 
limit — with what result? The hills have 
taken new form ; the woods have caught a 
new coloring ; he had never noticed that 
mountain slope in the distance ; what a 
beautiful bend that is in the sky, as it goes 
circling among the headlands and silver- 
edging the golden beach beyond ! A splen- 
did view this is from the top of this hill ! I 

242 



Ubc Celestial Summons 



never saw it in this fashion before — so near 
to where I have been living all my days, 
too. 

Just as surprising is the effect on the 
whole spiritual landscape of an advance 
movement in religion. How one real vic- 
tory over temptation explains a thousand 
promises we have read and reread and 
never understood or appreciated before! 
What a flood of new light conies pouring 
in with one hour of deep and earnest com- 
munion with the Master ! Thus the inter- 
est of the advancing Christian traveler never 
flags. There is a fresh charm in every por- 
tion of his way. He passes from strength 
to strength, from glory to glory. 

I remember now the opening sentence of 
a speech delivered at a political mass con- 
vention in New England, during my child- 
hood, by an eminent statesman, who said, 
" Fellow-citizens, from the various distract- 
ing questions now at issue between the par- 
ties and deeply agitating the mind of the 
country, I propose to call your attention 
away to a plain question of — bread." Need 
we ask if he had their attention in an in- 
stant? Not a husband, not a father, not a 
provider for a household in that great as- 

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Ube Celestial Summons 



sembly, but felt instantly the resistless elo- 
quence of that word " bread. " I might say 
that not only the orator, but the statesman, 
spoke there, for it is a question if the whole 
science of political economy does not resolve 
itself into one great science of bread. State 
questions and social conditions center in 
this and proceed from it. And in life's 
moral empire I doubt whether we ever get 
beyond the plain question of bread. 

Character and history, all that we are and 
all that we do, are only so many different 
evolutions of our need of material, mental, 
and spiritual food. We never get beyond 
the measure of our actual spiritual supply, 
we never sink below it. We grow stronger 
or weaker, we go upward or downward, 
our graces and our works stand or fall in 
close ratio with our communion with God. 
Every morning the commandments of God 
look in upon us anew, like divine judges 
who are to sit on our case at eventide. 
The duties of life break in upon us anew, 
like armed bands, to lead us out to the 
battle. 

The prince of the power of the air cometh 
forth as a false angel of light to allure, or as 
a roaring lion to devour. And you look 

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down in the sadness of your soul and say, 
" How can I escape the evil, and how can I 
cleave to the good ; how can I be true and 
pure and holy ; how can I overcome to-day 
the world, the flesh, and the devil? " Then 
the promises whisper together, i i Come, 
angel sisters, let us also fly and overtake 
him at the door, lest his soul should faint at 
the threshold of its way. Haste, angel 
sisters, we will bear him up in our hands, 
we will carry to him strength and comfort 
on our wings, we will bring him nearer his 
God to-day." You open the Bible — they 
have come ! There are given you i ' exceed- 
ing great and precious promises, that by 
these ye might be partakers of the divine 
nature, having escaped the corruption that 
is in the world.' ' You look forth, and the 
ground is already white with the manna ; 
you have only to gather it every morning. 

God seems to have arranged the develop- 
ment of religion with a view, a special 
view, to the preservation of its everlasting 
newness. Have you ever noticed that even 
its purely intellectual side bears this pecul- 
iarity? The world is debating the reli- 
gious question with as fresh an interest 
now as in any period past, though on dif- 

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ferent grounds. It is a curious fact that 
the intellectual interest in Christianity has 
not abated one iota in its whole course of 
more than eighteen centuries. M Is Chris- 
tianity true? " — tell me if this is considered 
an indifferent issue to-day. ' 'What is 
Christianity? " — tell me if our times account 
this an idle question. During the past 
nearly two thousand years there has not 
been an age so dark, an age when the hu- 
man mind has been so ignorant, that Chris- 
tianity has not shed into that age some 
light and strength to nourish the intellec- 
tual and moral life of society. At one 
time men are occupied chiefly in discussing 
the nature and first principles of religion ; 
at another, with the discussion of the facts 
of its history or its special theological truths. 
One century is busy with doctrines, another 
with institutions. Now we have an inter- 
val of profound abstractions, and now of 
practical elaborations. Fundamentals are 
the specialty of one period, details of an- 
other. Again, a critical age sets in and 
insists on reviewing, redefining, and read- 
justing the whole subject. 

The present is such an age ; and it is not 
for us as Christians to find fault with the 



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ZTbe Celestial Summons 



critical spirit. It is science that kindles it, 
and it is Christianity that kindles science. 
And the result of the critical spirit is a spur 
to human thought; a new movement of the 
human mind — even of mind that never 
moved before ; an end of all inertia ; a re- 
bellion against all routine ; a breaking away 
and coming up out of the deadlock of forms 
and fictions and stagnant conventionalities ; 
a searching and sifting and digging down 
to the roots of things ; a taking nothing for 
granted or matter of course any more ; a 
summoning of all things before the open 
court of the world, making them to stand 
and plead on their merits. Behold, how a 
fiery debate is kindling around the globe 
and sharpening the wits of the world! 
Christianity is the subject of much of this, 
and the origin of most of it. A dead re- 
ligion ? Not very dead ; on the contrary, 
it is a religion that can put new life into 
the race. 

The very evidences of Christianity have 
been, to some extent, transformed and re- 
arranged. New standpoints of examina- 
tion have been reached, grander eminences 
attained. The argument grows broader. 
Biology, psychology, chemistry, languages, 

247 



Ubc Celestial Summons 



geographical exploration, exhumed manu- 
scripts and marbles from monastic clois- 
ters, from oriental monuments, from Pales- 
tine, from Chaldea, from Egyptian temples 
and Assyrian palaces — what a variety of 
sciences and pursuits and archaeological 
treasures have contributed to this argu- 
mentative expansion ! Thus the hungry 
mind, as well as the hungry heart, of man 
still finds in the Christian religion some- 
thing ever fresh and new. There is yet 
no prospect that either the spiritual or the 
intellectual freshness of the Gospel will 
ever be exhausted while there are hearts to 
feel or brains to think in this world. 

The importunate social problems that are 
clamoring for solution are largely ethical ; 
and when we think of the ethical or moral 
element we involuntarily think of Christ, 
the only perfect expounder of ethics whom 
history has known. The wisest minds per- 
ceive that it is to Christianity that society 
must look for the solving of its profound- 
est problems; that only Christianity can 
simplify and unify the movement of an 
increasingly complex civilization and bring 
in a higher social with a higher moral 
order. 



248 



Ube Celestial Summons 



Of course, it is not necessary to assume 
that every ebullition of organized selfish- 
ness or popular passion has its real under- 
lying cause in a noble unrest making for 
the lifting upward of human society. Nor 
can anyone yet tell how far the Christian 
ideal of society is capable of being realized 
by revolutionary, rather than evolutionary, 
processes. Yet the fact remains that the 
kingdom of God is founded upon ideas 
and principles that make for the higher 
social as well as spiritual development of 
the race. And these principles have not 
only a progressive but a necessary activ- 
ity, and whatever will not fall in with their 
current voluntarily is swept into it invol- 
untarily; for sometimes the operations of 
God in the world are like the movement of 
the air and of the sea, that nothing can 
withstand. Men are authorized to expect, 
not a new kingdom of God, but a new mani- 
festation of it ; and in ascertaining and de- 
fining and applying these principles they 
will need all their wisdom as well as all their 
skill. The decisive centuries of the world's 
history are not all past. 

Great is their mistake who imagine that 
the social changes and peculiarities of this 



TIbe Celestial Summons 

age are altogether adverse to the Christian 
life. On the contrary, they are favorable to 
it. Less than fifty years ago religion hardly 
entered directly into a man's social life — 
hardly enough to feed the hunger of his 
sympathies and satisfy his demand for 
religious activity and association. Sundays 
it preached to him, once or twice a week it 
prayed and sang with him ; but at the 
church door it parted with him — as a social 
being. Now it is prepared to hold him 
in continuous and hallowed enthusiasm. 
There were then but few religious books or 
papers, and most of them are now interest- 
ing chiefly because of their strange dearth 
of interest. We are surprised that such 
curiosities of dullness could have once been 
so current ; and yet they were. Now mark 
the profusion of religious literature in all its 
ample and attractive variety and within the 
reach of all. Then the representative re- 
ligious music, though stately and solemn, 
lacked much of that sweet soulfulness, that 
sentiment of pathos and ringing victory, 
that reaches and melts and moves all 
classes, the heart of childhood and of age, 
giving to our concerts of praise such a won- 
drous charm and power. 

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Then if a man enjoyed any opportunities 
of doing or receiving good beyond the fa- 
miliar church routine it was because he had 
made them for himself. Now such oppor- 
tunities seek him. He is fairly immersed 
in Christian work, mind, body, and soul. 
The organized departments of religious 
work are continually appealing to him, 
throwing themselves upon his hands and 
heart for sympathy and care and aid. 
There is the League, and the lyceum, and 
the social circle, and the temperance society, 
and the benevolent society; this week a 
committee, and next week a convention. 
And, besides all these, the Young Men's 
Christian Association, the Sunday school 
work in its various phases, and the great 
cause of missions are worlds in themselves. 
There is something all the time to interest 
him, to animate him in the work of right- 
eousness and manly usefulness, to neutralize 
temptation and call forth his noblest powers. 
Especially, a young Christian in these times 
is the most enviable of mortals. The earth 
does not hold a busier, happier, freer, more 
exalted soul than that person who broadly 
enters into the Christian spirit and work of 
to-day; whose prayer, < ' Give us this day 

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our daily bread," God answers with the liv- 
ing bread that cometh down from heaven. 
Lord, evermore give us this bread ! 

It is such a blessed thing to be a manna 
gatherer. There are enough who gather 
all that is sinful and sorrowful that the 
world offers, enough who faint and falter in 
the great struggle of life. They do not 
know how the manna falls in the night, and 
light springs out of darkness, and good is 
wrought out of evil, and the joy of immor- 
tality is born of the despair of death. But 
if you will be of the Israel of God resolve 
to be a manna gatherer. God will lead you 
nowhere where he does not send it shower- 
ing down around you. Over barren rocks 
that yield no earthly verdure, amid scorching 
deserts that wither every fruit that never- 
tiring nature tries to ripen, through the 
night shades of trial and temptation, every- 
where — soft and silent as the dew of heaven, 
everywhere the unfailing manna falls. 
Gather it. Gather it every morning. Daily 
gather up God's quiet bounties of strength 
and joy and hope. Resolve to go out into the 
world and know for yourself the satisfying 
sweetness and blessedness of life. Though 
you break the hard earth of adversity, yet 

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above you will spread an open heaven of 
love ; and you will learn, by an experience 
that will bring you comfort and peace, that 
where sin abounds grace does much more 
abound, and though pestilence walketh 
in darkness, yet through the darkness 
do fly the angels of God. Nobly set 
yourself to take the truer, Christian view 
of life. Let the whole Church live on the 
daily manna, the living bread ever coming 
down from heaven. 

And then shall we not be forced to blush 
when the skeptic demands a newer and 
better truth and religious revelations that 
are adapted to the present advanced devel- 
opment of the human mind. We shall 
no longer wince at the sarcasms he directs 
against what he is pleased to consider an 
old and worn-out Gospel. But we shall 
make glad answer, rather. God does not 
so much design that we shall find the inter- 
est and freshness of spiritual life in new 
truth as in new applications and experiences 
of the truth, new discoveries of its meaning 
and power, deepening with every want, 
heightened with every joy, expanding with 
our capacity to receive it, modified with 

every modification of circumstances affecting 

17 

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the individual, and society, and the world 
at large. 

The germinating power of Christianity 
bears fruit in every age, on every soil, ac- 
cording to the peculiarities of that soil, ac- 
cording to the requirements of that age. It 
rearranges its work, adjusts its influences 
and energies to the new conditions of 
society on which it has to act, so that no 
emergency can take it by surprise, no social 
or moral progress of society can leave it be- 
hind. The world may grow and grow, but 
it can no more outgrow the Gospel than this 
planet can outgrow the heavens. Christian- 
ity elevates government, popular education, 
the social relations, the use of wealth and 
power ; it opens missions ; it endows schools, 
hospitals, orphanages ; it establishes chari- 
ties of every kind and every where — charities 
that girdle the globe ; proclaims liberty, 
promotes peace, compels reform, and 
utilizes the world's forces ; and it does all 
this by means of a mighty array of sympa- 
thetic influences and related institutions 
with which the popular mind scarcely 
credits it at all, and so develops a higher 
and broader humanity, rallying and rein- 
forcing the powers of righteousness. Chris- 

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tianity is doing a work to-day which the prim- 
itive Christians probably never dreamed 
of its doing or attempting. The world 
changes ; but with every new historic morn- 
ing God's manna is on the ground. 

The manna that fed the Jew will not feed 
the Christian ; and, perhaps, the manna that 
feeds the Christian of to-day will be inad- 
equate to the Christian of the future. For 
He is coming — Christ is coming. I see his 
brow, beaming with a light that never en- 
circled ours. I hear his step, resounding 
along the highways of the " good time com- 
ing " and heralding a higher freedom for 
humanity. He is coming, with no new 
Gospel, but with new expositions and ap- 
plications that would seem almost a new 
Gospel if it were preached to our conserva- 
tism to-day. 

" None of us liveth to himself, and no man 
dieth to himself." The Jew lived and 
wrought and died for our day unknowingly; 
and we are entered into his labors. We 
as unknowingly live and work and die for 
the coming times; and into our labors will 
enter still other laborers. And Christ en- 
ters into all — the food of the ages, by whom 
they all live and grow. And so the good 

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old way is still the " new and living way," 
and the Gospel that was in the beginning 
is now and ever shall be; not stationary, 
not stagnant, but full of the freshness and 
freedom essential to the soul's proper activ- 
ity and the world's perpetual renovation and 
progress and growth. O how the living 
waters flow, and the heavenly manna falls ! 
The feast is spread in the wilderness, the 
pillars of cloud and fire lead on, and soon 
we shall strike our tents and march tri- 
umphantly into the promised land. 

" Belov'd, belov'd ! not fire and cloud alone 

From bondage and the wilderness restore, 
And guide the wandering spirit to its own ; 

But all His elements, they go before. 
Upon their way the seasons bring, 
And hearten with foreshadowing, 

The resurrection wonder. 
What lands of death awake and sing, 
And germs of hope swell under ! 
And full and fine, and full and fine, 
The day distills life's golden wine; 
And night is Palace Beautiful, peace-chambered. 
All things are ours ; and life fills up of them 
Such measure as we hold. 

For ours beyond the gate, 
The deep things, the untold, 
We only wait." 



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xn 

&l)e Jtttllenmal Call 



44 O house of Jacob, come ye, and let us walk in the light of 
the Lord." — Isa* ii, 5* 



Uhc Celestial Summons 



XII 

The Millennial Call 

The voice of divine invitation — how 
variously it falls upon our ears ! Sometimes 
like the peal of a bugle, so high and loud 
and glad ; sometimes like a sweet and plain- 
tive song, breathing upon the heart's deep- 
est chords with heavenly tenderness, the very- 
pathos of the skies. It falls upon our ears 
and upon our hearts in the words of our 
text: " O house of Jacob, come ye, and let 
us walk in the light of the Lord." 

To walk in the light is to walk in the 
truth of the Lord ; to live in conformity with 
the precepts and privileges revealed in his 
word. Yet it is well worth our effort to as- 
certain more definitely what the prophet 
means by walking in the light, or truth. It 
may aid us in discovering his meaning to 
quote the full passage in which our text 
occurs: " And it shall come to pass in the 
last days, that the mountain of the Lord's 
house shall be established in the top of the 
mountains, and shall be exalted above the 



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hills; and all nations shall flow unto it. 
And many people shall go and say, Come 
ye, and let us go up to the mountain of the 
Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob ; and 
he will teach us of his ways, and we will 
walk in his paths : for out of Zion shall go 
forth the law, and the word of the Lord from 
Jerusalem. And he shall judge among the 
nations, and shall rebuke many people : and 
they shall beat their swords into plow- 
shares, and their spears into pruninghooks : 
nation shall not lift tip sword against nation, 
neither shall they learn war any more. O 
house of Jacob, come ye, and let us walk in 
the light of the Lord." 

You will see at once that this is a descrip- 
tion of the Messiah's earthly reign. Here 
we have the worship of God portrayed 
under the figure of a mountain. The Church 
will be baptized with the Spirit of God and 
will draw the nations into its communion ; 
and the conditions of society will be bright- 
ened with the pervading power of the Gos- 
pel truth. " Thy word," said the psalmist, 
1 ' is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto 
my path." 

The word, that is, the truth, of God is 
light, and to whatever extent the truth is 

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experienced that light shines. Let the 
truth enter an individual soul, and darkness 
has passed away ; let the truth shine in with 
all its splendor, and the heart is filled with 
a millennial blessedness. Let the truth per- 
meate any church, and it will experience a 
millennial power and glory. And if ever 
there is to be a reign of righteousness and 
peace and gladness throughout the world it 
will spring from the aggregated experience 
of each of the different individual hearts and 
homes and churches and communities and 
nations of the world. 

There is possibly a difference of opinion 
in this congregation, indeed in every con- 
gregation, on the probability of a universal, 
redeeming reign of Christ in this world. 
But we all concede how unspeakably desir- 
able would be such a glorious consumma- 
tion ; and its very desirableness inspires our 
hope and tends in large measure to its own 
realization. 

Let us, then, suppose ourselves to be 
fully convinced that a period will come 
when the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, 
and all flesh shall see it together ; when the 
knowledge of his glory shall cover the earth 
"as the waters cover the sea;" when no 



2G1 



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man shall teach his brother, ' ' saying, 
Know thou the Lord : for all shall know me 
from the least to the greatest;" when the 
weapons of destructive war shall be applied 
to the peaceful pursuits of useful industry, 
childlike trust shall take the place of fear 
and terror in the earth, and the Messiah 
shall reign in the midst of his saints ; when 
all the holiness and all the happiness and 
all the redemptive power predicted of the 
Messiah's earthly reign at last are realized, 
and i ' the kingdoms of this world are become 
the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his 
Christ." 

Now, what is the truth that must be real- 
ized before so remarkable a period can be 
inaugurated? 

We first assume that all acknowledgment 
of the truth must be a practical acknowledg- 
ment conceded by the whole being, and 
widely different from the mere conviction 
of the understanding or confession of the 
lips ; that the heart must assent to whatever 
religious idea or opinion receives credit as. 
truth with a sincere, adoring, unquestioning 
" amen." 

Truth, especially religious truth, must be 
something more than a spiritless and empty 



Zhc Celestial Summons 



shadow. It must be something more than 
mere matter for debate, something more 
than a mere creed or a name. It must 
command a reverence worthy of its divinity. 
It must be a positive and controlling reality, 
wielding an absolute supremacy over the 
entire man. It must vitalize every faculty 
of the soul and be applied in every action 
of the outer life. 

And, further, before Christ shall appear 
the second time, and all the holy angels 
with him, before the Church can shine in 
its highest terrestrial splendor, and all na- 
tions shall flow unto it because the Lord's 
house is established in the top of the moun- 
tains and exalted above the hills and because 
of the beauty of holiness, before the ran- 
somed of the Lord shall return with joy 
and gladness unto Zion, the Saviour's rich 
and sanctifying grace and the height and 
depth of the Gospel's capacity to bring men 
from darkness to light, and from the power 
of Satan unto God, must be the supreme in- 
spiration of praise and thanksgiving. 

The eighth chapter of Romans must be- 
come the positive and profound experience 
of the Christian Church. All sense of con- 
demnation as oppressing those who profess 

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to be the Lord's, all thought of duties un- 
performed and privileges unaccepted, of 
prayers unoffered and praise unrendered, 
of affections opposed to the love of God or 
attachment to any sort of business or 
pleasure inconsistent with a reverent sense 
of his presence and of our own responsi- 
bilities, must be lost in the full and com- 
plete blessedness of the knowledge that we 
are more than conquerors through him that 
loved us and gave himself for our redemp- 
tion. We must diligently study the word 
of God. We must drink long and deeply of 
the fountain that was opened for sin and 
uncleanness — the fountain whence flow the 
rivers of salvation that are for the healing 
of the nations. We must fill our hearts 
with a heavenly love that is manifested in 
every word and deed, in every thought and- 
motive of our being. 

We hear the Gospel lifting its joyful 
sound, like a trumpet, and calling men to 
journey in a highway that is prepared for 
the redeemed to walk in, even the King's 
highway of holiness. From the north and 
from the south and from the east and from 
the west, lo, they come, the children of 
Zion come thronging, judgment is laid to 

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the line, and righteousness to the plummet, 
and upon the bells of the horses is written, 
" Holiness to the Lord." 

A determined walk in the truth means, 
also, the fulfillment of the visible duties 
which the truth discloses, such a growth 
toward maturity in righteousness as shall 
reveal itself in the numerous relations of 
life. Parents and children, brothers and 
sisters, kindred, neighbors, citizens, rulers 
and subjects, employers and employed — all 
must maintain their different relations in 
the Lord. The young, the middle-aged, and 
the old, people of every position and every 
sphere, must perform the duties and exhibit 
the highest graces possible to their several 
stations. Religion must permeate vitally 
the manifold arrangements of society and 
be, in fact, the mainspring of all its move- 
ments. Indeed, the business of life itself 
must be to serve and enjoy and glorify God, 
and carry forward his high designs for the 
good of all his creatures. 

An ardent devotion to God's service must 
distinguish every soul, and men's value be 
estimated by their value to Christ and by 
the priceless cost of their redemption. Each 
soul must give abundant utterance to his 

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sense of God's great goodness in redeeming 
him, and must talk of his righteousness and 
sing of the glorious majesty of his king- 
dom. 

No winebibbing Christian, no self-im- 
peached Christian, no railing or foul- 
mouthed member of the Church of God, no 
covetous eye, no overreaching hand shall 
defile the radiant ranks of the Church tri- 
umphant when it has at last become the 
pure and spotless bride of the crucified and 
risen Lord. Clean motives, a purified sen- 
sibility, an intense spirituality of mind, 
must repel every attempted invasion of the 
powers of darkness and sin. Every occasion 
must be seized to exalt the name of God, 
every opportunity improved to promote the 
holiness and happiness of his creatures. And 
when at last the supreme desire of humanity 
shall have become a universal and entire har- 
mony with the purposes of God, then will the 
earth become in very deed the prelude and 
vestibule of heaven. It means all this to 
walk in the light and the truth of the Lord. 

But this metaphor which represents the 
truth as light suggests also the effects of 
the light, the general and diffusive influ- 
ences which radiate from it ; and this greatly 



XTbe Celestial Summons 



enlarges the significance of the metaphor. 
As all the rich varieties and combinations of 
color we witness are only so many modi- 
fications of light, as light not only brings 
safety but reveals the beatity so requisite 
to human happiness and aesthetic growth, 
so all the rich, sweet, heavenly hues that 
present the millennial world so fair and 
lustrous to our thought are but the varied 
reflections and blessings of that vital light 
which saves the soul from sin. 

Let us, then, behold the house of Jacob 
walking in the light, when at length the 
Lord's house shall have been established on 
the mountain top and all nations are flowing 
unto it. 

What blessed peace there is! Remorse- 
ful agitations, gloomy misgivings, distract- 
ing doubts and fears, that threw their dark 
and lingering shadows over our way — lo, 
they are fled, and the peace of God, that 
passeth all understanding, fills to overflow- 
ing our hearts and minds. No earthly idol 
comes between to eclipse the splendor of 
celestial light; neglected crosses mar no 
longer the pleasing vistas of our redeemed 
and ransomed lives ; no black cloud-masses 
of temptation and sin shall dim the holy 

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confidence with which we shall look up to 
God our Father and to heaven our home. 
The world has lost its evil dominion over 
us. Its misleading lights of sinful pleas- 
ure and ambition no longer allure us into 
danger ; for we have found in the favor and 
friendship of God a portion that outshines 
the world's brightest fortunes, and a conso- 
lation that illumines our darkest adversi- 
ties. 

Not only do we now experience a sweet 
contentment, but we feel within us ardent, 
heart-lifting impulses, a lofty and noble en- 
thusiasm for all that is pure and good and 
beautiful. There is no dullness in life, 
now, for the light of the Lord irradiates the 
landscape and illumines all the dark places 
in our path. Every faculty of our being is 
alert and developed to the highest pitch of 
pure and sanctified enjoyment. There is no 
bitterness of spirit, no envy, hatred, malice, 
nor any uncharitableness, for light has 
shone into the depths of the soul and glad- 
dened it with universal love. We have new 
objects to work for, new affections and new 
powers to work with. The light of the 
Lord changes the dismal hues of the great 
world into brightness and beauty, and 

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Ube Celestial Summons 

heaven is mirrored upon earth as the sky 
upon the sea. 

So shall the house of Jacob walk in 
the light as God is in the light, and 
have fellowship one with another; and 
the blood of Christ shall cleanse them 
from all sin and impurity. Let us, then, 
welcome the hour of prayer ; welcome the 
communings of the closet and the sanctuary ; 
welcome smiling fortunes if they be given 
us, that we may consecrate them to Christ ; 
welcome, if need be, the trials that shall 
discipline our faith and develop our Chris- 
tian fortitude and courage. Let Christians 
everywhere and at all times be hopeful and 
of good heart, 

u For they are tending upward too, 

As fast as time can move ; 
Nor would they wish the hours more slow, 

To keep them from their love." 

No, they are pilgrims on the march to a 
more beautiful country, " a city which hath 
foundations, whose builder and maker is 
God." Every hour claims its toilsome effort 
and its urgent duties ; but the way grows 
brighter as it nears the heavenly portals, 
and the journey ends at length in the ec- 
stasies of immortal joy. 
is 

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I have attempted to outline what the truth 
is that shall reign with Christ at his coming 
again and the methods by which that truth 
must be enthroned and the Prince of Peace 
made undisputed sovereign of the world and 
of men. Before this can be accomplished 
men must learn to reverence the truth and 
reverence Him who is " the way, the truth, 
and the life." They must go wherever the 
truth shall lead them, though it be into 
the dens of lions, or into dark Gethsemanes, 
or up the painful slopes where waits some 
lonely and relentless cross. They must be 
alive to the importance of enjoying the 
highest spiritual privileges within their 
grasp. They must fulfill, with all their 
heart and mind and soul and strength, the 
ordinary duties with which life confronts 
them. They must suffuse all their human 
relationships with such divine faithfulness 
and hope and love that by the very perform- 
ance of life's humble duties their Christian 
character shall be strengthened and per- 
fected. In no other way can the millennium 
which so many laden and longing hearts 
look forward to with patient hope and ex- 
pectation be brought at length to a blessed 
and complete realization. 

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And now let me ask, whether belief or dis- 
belief in the probability of the coming of 
the glorified Christ to reign over a purified 
and sanctified earth a thousand years at all 
affects the responsibility of an individual 
or a generation living under the Gospel 
dispensation to walk in the clear and holy 
light of God. If all men would but accept 
that dispensation, as all may accept it if 
they will, then would be realized the long- 
deferred hope of the saints, and a millennium 
would begin in all respects similar to that 
of Jewish prophecy and Christian faith. If 
all other men, my brother, should prefer 
darkness to light, that would not excuse 
you from your duty to walk in the comple- 
test day of the Sun of righteousness. It 
would still be your duty to devote your un- 
divided heart to Christ's service, though all 
men else should live in the blackness of 
willful iniquity. If ever the millennium is 
to come it must be ushered in through the 
conversion and consecration of a multitude 
of such individual souls as you. May it 
not be that through your efforts some soul 
may be saved that shall turn many to right- 
eousness and herald the dawning of the bet- 
ter day? 



Sbe Celestial Summons 



On his cross, at the moment of his bit- 
terest agony, Christ bowed his head and 
cried with his expiring breath, " It is fin- 
ished." Do you need to ask what it was 
that was finished ? The work of revelation ; 
the atoning work of redeeming a perishing 
world, at the price of the shameful death of 
the only-begotten Son of the eternal Father. 
Henceforth no man was to add to or take from 
the book of prophecy. All that was need- 
ed to save the world, except the work of re- 
pentance in each separate sinful heart, had 
been accomplished. An atoning Christ, a 
sufficient Bible, a divine and indwelling 
Holy Spirit, had been offered to the world, 
and all the forces of salvation had been pro- 
jected into the moral universe. 

It now lay with each separate unit in the 
vast aggregate of humanity to open his 
own poor, sin-burdened heart to a reign of 
peace and love and gladness, to a millen- 
nium in his own personal consciousness and 
the activities of his own personal life, and 
thus do all that was in his power to bring 
about the universal reign of Christ over a 
redeemed and renovated world. It is not 
our business to wait for the millennium, 
but to work for it, to appropriate its spirit 



Ztbe Celestial Summons 



in our very souls and embody it in our lives, 
claiming the utmost privileges of our re- 
demption, fulfilling the utmost duties of 
our various stations, and seeing to it that 
within the circle of our own influence God's 
will is really done on earth as it is done in 
heaven. 

The fountain that is to cleanse the nations, 
what is it but the old, old fountain opened 
eighteen hundred years ago? O, how it 
gushes and overflows this very moment! 
The light that shall shine down upon the 
holy Church and the happy world that are 
to be, what else is it but the heavenly radi- 
ance from this very Book whose precepts 
and promises your children know by heart? 
The wolf that shall dwell with the lamb, and 
the leopard that shall lie down with the kid, 
what are they but emblems of that charity 
that should now fill our souls? And the 
law that shall go forth from Zion — the Zion 
of a purified and living Church — and take 
possession of all law and literature and phi- 
losophy, all ideas and institutions of soci- 
ety, and cause all nations to flow unto the 
Lord's house established in the top of the 
mountains — what is this but an expression 
for a spiritual fervor and fidelity that should 

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characterize every sanctuary where God is 
worshiped, and where now it too often 
happens that barely half the pews are ten- 
anted w T ith listless souls. O, how God is 
calling, and how the house of Jacob is de- 
laying ! 

For the use of our privileges we are re- 
sponsible, and by these we shall be judged ; 
not by our conformity to the articles of a 
Church creed, not by a mere intellectual 
assent to this doctrine or to that, but by the 
use we make of our opportunities for devel- 
oping our own Christian characters by car- 
ing for the needy, the helpless, the sorrow- 
ing, and the sinful. To do this is pure and 
undefiled religion and the test of our loyalty 
to Christ; and to him we owe as true and 
self-sacrificing allegiance now as if, this 
very hour, his visible throne were set up in 
the midst of the earth, and patriarchs and 
prophets, apostles and martyrs and saints, 
summoned from their long-forgotten graves 
before our very eyes, stood about him and 
ministered to him as princes of his court. 

You are thinking of that bright era as 
something far off; but no, the foundations 
of its glorious and golden temple are already 
laid. What matters it whose hands shall 



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raise its capstone, or whose eyes shall behold 
the finished beauty of its mighty architec- 
ture, or whose voices shall cry, ' ' Grace, 
grace unto it?" We can build on the 
foundation that is laid, even Christ. That 
foundation is as solid and sure at this moment 
as it will ever be. It takes millions of peo- 
ple to make up a millennium, but any man 
may make up his own part of it. Our duty 
is to be millennial men and women ; to go 
up and down these streets, to walk the earth 
daily, feeling and knowing that we repre- 
sent just so much of the world's grandest 
hope, just so much of God's glory in a re- 
deemed humanity. Our duty is to do busi- 
ness on millennial principles, and on no 
other. Our duty now is to make our homes 
homes of millennial blessedness as really as 
if the music of Christ's passing chariot and 
the acclamations of adoring millions rolled 
daily in at our windows, and the smoke of our 
chimneys rose toward the peaceful heavens 
throbbing with the loving nearness of our 
God. Our duty is to make this church as 
truly an abode of reverent and absorbing 
worship as if the very Christ walked daily 
these aisles, and gave sanctity to these 
altars, and listened to every sermon, every 



Ube Celestial Summons 



prayer, every hymn, every exhortation that 
rises within these walls, and taught from 
this pulpit his gracious words of truth and 
power. 

The millennium ? Yes, it is the ideal of 
every longing soul that burns with love to 
God and man. It is the " good time com- 
ing " — a time of righteousness and happi- 
ness, when all shall know the Lord and love 
one another. 

But where are our millennial men, our 
millennial ministers, our millennial churches, 
like cities set upon a hill, representing the 
grand possibilities of humanity in the Gos- 
pel and working to actualize the triumphs 
of redemption of which we love to talk and 
sing? Millennial! God forgive us ! Where 
are even our revival men, our revival mem- 
bers of churches and class meetings and 
prayer meetings, full of all faith in God's 
truth and communicating faith to others by 
the fruits of their faithful Christian lives? 

" O come ye! " So much depends upon 
leaving the old familiar haunts where dark- 
ness lingers, so much depends upon stepping 
out from the old unsatisfying experiences 
and the old conventional routine and fol- 
lowing the standard that leads into light. 



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Nothing short of this can bring a man out 
of darkness or set his soul at liberty. " O 
come ye! " The world has called, and we 
have hearkened and have followed its bale- 
ful lights that lead only to gloom. Will not 
the past suffice ? Let us now hearken to a 
diviner call and walk the rest of our pilgrim- 
age in a sweeter and purer light. 

Our text utters one of the sweetest 
u comes " in the whole Bible. It summons 
us to no impossibility, it perplexes us with 
no obscure or dubious standards of duty. 
What is impracticable and unattainable, 
what is dubious and obscure, is not light. 
The text points to a light w r hich each heart 
instinctively recognizes as its native element, 
the source to which, when every hindrance is 
removed, it aspires as naturally as smoke 
rises into the higher atmosphere. It sum- 
mons you into the light of God. Come into 
it, walk in it, let it envelop you and fill you 
through and through. 

Anyone may come ; everyone may come ; 
whosoever will may come. Unless you come 
into the light, my brother, condemnation is 
inevitable. Not even the most rigid moral- 
ist, not even the most sincere and candid 
skeptic can refuse the light that shineth in 

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darkness and stand erect at the bar of his 
own conscience. But if only the soul throws 
open its windows to the warm and benig- 
nant rays of the celestial sunlight, condem- 
nation is impossible and the soul shall 
stand justified and without fear before the 
judgment seat of Christ. Is the soul dark ; 
is life dark; is death dark; is everything 
dark? Come; nothing but light will end 
the darkness, and when you come the 
shadows shall flee away. 

There is nothing simpler, nothing wiser 
and more reasonable, nothing sweeter than 
to come out of darkness into the light. It 
will bring strength and peace, purity and 
rest, usefulness and victory, and countless 
millenniums of glorified eternity. Come, 
then, leave every worldly pleasure, every 
false path that leadeth only unto death, and 
let us hasten to yield ourselves to the 
Messiah's rightful sovereignty, that he may 
reign over us forever and forever. 

Sometimes, as you turn over the pages of 
precept and promise — precepts so true and 
promises so inspiriting — there comes a vision 
to you, and you close your eyes and dream 
a wonderful dream. You think how blessed 
would be humanity if it only accepted these 

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precepts and these promises; how heart 
would be turned to heart; what happy 
families, what peaceful, prosperous nations 
would be the glad result ; and you close with 
a sigh and say, ' ' O, what a world this might 
be." God help us each to say, rather, " O, 
what a man, what a woman, I might be." 
Ye who perceive what pure religion would 
do for the world confess what it would do 
for yourselves. Ye who have faith in the 
future have faith in to-day. Ye who think 
ye behold afar off, on the mount foretold 
by prophecy, the beaming of the latter-day 
glory, who have lingered in spirit amid the 
light and love of a millennium to be, who 
have listened in thought to the soft chime 
of its bells and flow of its peaceful waters, 
who have looked upon the mellow beauty of 
its skies and trodden the soft turf of its 
sacred fields — know ye that this hour is the 
millennium reached out to your souls, and 
that the Messiah waits to inaugurate his 
holy and triumphant reign. 

And thou who walkest life's paths in 
darkness and sadness, finding no comfort 
and catching no ray of hope or joy, thou 
mourner along life's lonely road, Jesus 
waits to give thee the light of life, and the 

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days of thy mourning shall be ended. O 
come. Come now. Christ is waiting where 
the many mansions be. The Spirit is knock- 
ing at your heart. The millennial bells 
hang ready for human hands to ring in the 
new and better time. What -wait you for? 
O house of Jacob, O all the earth, come ye ; 
let us wait no longer, but let us walk from 
this moment in the light of the Lord. 

Will you take the first step? O human 
soul, made to exist in an element of light, 
even in the light of God forever, unless that 
step be taken the alternative for you may 
be darkness leading unto darkness, over- 
shadowing, deepening, yea, overwhelming 
— the 11 outer darkness" where God and 
Christ and heaven and the redeemed of 
earth are not. Take the first step, and 
other steps will follow, leading you to that 
perfect light where is no darkness at all. 
Take the step and your whole being shall 
be bathed in light, your whole life hence- 
forth be a mission of light. 

Take a step this very hour toward the 
light, and it may be that the one step will 
usher you into the light. O come ye, and let 
us walk in the light of the Lord, toward the 
ringing of the glad millennial bells. 

280 



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